US Secured Top Spot in Spam Generation during Q2 2009

According to a new security threat report from Sophos, the US occupied
the top place on the spam list for the second quarter of 2009 by
originating one out of six (almost 15.6%) of total unsolicited e-mails.

Brazil, Turkey and India followed the US with 11.1%, 5.2% and 5.0% of
unsolicited e-mail respectively in the period. Other spam generating
countries that made place on the list were South Korea (4.7%), Poland
(4.2%), China (4.1%), Spain (3.4%) and Vietnam (2.3%).

The online security further said that although the problem had its root
in the US, internet users suffered from spam worldwide. Explaining the
menace, Graham Cluley, Senior Technology Consultant at Sophos, said -
the problem could be better managed if the US cleaned up all its
infected systems, as reported by Webuser on July 20, 2009.

In addition, Sophos said that the US had to wage a long war against
cyber crime if it wanted to reduce the effects of spam in the country.
Cluley further said that the statement given by the President Barack
Obama recently on the cyber security focused on cyber criminals
residing overseas but the statistics showed that a big part of them
problem stemmed within the country, as reported by PCAdvisor on July
20, 2009.

Moreover, spammers are moving towards the inclusion of social
networking websites such as Twitter in their attack vectors, and are
utilizing services of URL shortening such as bit.ly and TinyURL to
upgrade the sophistication level of their attacks. Cyber criminals are
extensively using URL shortening services that help them to obscure
malicious links for integrating them in spam mails and posting them on
social networking websites and other high traffic networks. In fact,
this method has become a preferred vector of criminals for making
higher number of victims.

The point of interest is the fall of Russia on the list as it occupied
the second place in the second quarter of 2008 by producing 7.5% of the
global spam. This time Russia receded to the ninth position from second
last year as it contributed just 3.2% of the total unsolicited e-mails
despite the fact that spam laws in Russia are not as strict as in other
countries of the world.

Related article: US Passes Baton to Asia in Spam Relay

» SPAMfighter News - 8/5/2009