U.S. On Top of Spam Charts

IE Internet's new e-mail security figures show that the U.S. heads the spam lists for June 2007.

Of the total spam that Irish security and e-mail monitoring company IE Internet filtered during June 2007, the U.S. produced the maximum at 37.4 percent, far too ahead to chase. Accounting for 17 percent of spam going out to Irish companies, China stood second in the rating. U.K. was in the third place with 10.9 percent. Mexico occupied the fourth spot with 9.9 percent and Russia rose to the fifth place contributing 7.6 percent of the entire volume of spam.

Spam originating in the U.S. rose again to remarkable levels. Earlier U.S. remained on top in spam generation worldwide, but with the enforcement of legislation several U.S. spammers shifted their operations to foreign lands, told Ken O'Driscoll, chief technical officer of IE Internet to ENN on July 6, 2007.

According to a recent warning from the U.S. Department of Justice, it has urged the public to avoid bogus e-mails and not to respond to them. The DOJ issued this warning because the spammers have been illegally using the government logos in their e-mails to make them appear legitimate.

Spammers are evolving the trend of targeted attacks on chosen users with the motivation of financial rewards. This highlights the effort and research the bad guys are putting to potentially acquire lucrative information, said Mark Sunner, chief security analyst of IE Internet, as reported by Thechannelshow on July 4, 2007.

After assessing e-mails delivered to 35,000 Irish enterprises, IE Internet determined that 67.4 percent of them were spam. Of the total e-mails delivered to Irish businesses, viruses accounted for only 4.1 percent in June 2007.

There has been a declining trend for viruses. In 2002 viruses would have accounted for 20 percent of e-mails. Now there are fewer instances of virus infections on business computers. They are affecting more of home PCs, said O'Driscoll.

O'Driscoll elaborated that virus creators attack home computers to compromise them with the objective of using them for spamming. Sometimes they even sell access to zombie PCs to other spammers, O'Driscoll added.

Related article: U.S. Businesses Lose $712 Per Worker Due to Spam

» SPAMfighter News - 7/23/2007