Philippines Circulates Spam Accounting for 87% of E-mails

A vast majority of total e-mail moving across the Internet in the Philippines has been reported as spam or unwanted bulk advertising, one of the key providers of software security said on October 9, 2007. AFP published this in news on October 11, 2007.

The research by a world's leading company, Symantec, the Calif.-based provider of anti-virus software and computer security, found that the country had nearly 87% of its electronic mail as unsolicited messages.

With this, the Philippines ranks second in the Asian continent after Uzbekistan, where spam accounts for 88% of all e-mail, said Richard Velasco, Senior Technical Consultant at Symantec, Philippines. AFP published this on October 11, 2007.

Symantec further found that the Philippines currently occupies the fourth position in Southeast Asia in terms of the volume of cyber-attacks it suffered. Such attacks included spam zombies, phishing, and 'command and control' attacks.

Vietnam ranked third accounting for 84% spam, according to the study by Symantec, which keeps track of global online activity. The amount of spam mails in the Philippines too is as high as 88% of total e-mail distributed.

In another news that ABS-CNS published on October 11 2007, Velasco reported that as Internet connectivity and number of cyber cafes increased in the Philippines, they led to proliferation of bots, or infected computers that hackers gain control of remotely. Such a situation is alarming for the country, which is becoming a favorite target for cyber miscreants, he said.

Velasco further noted that most medium and small businesses in the Philippines are not properly equipped with anti-spam software. So the growth of junk e-mails that consume extra bandwidth and storage tend to increase costs for those enterprises as they start to lose productivity. The average number of e-mails coming to a medium or small company is 5,000 per day. But when the number increases to 15,000 per day, companies start spending more thinking they are receiving more e-mails, which are actually spam, he said.

Symantec observed that there was a median 15,447 bot-infected PCs per day in Japan and the Asia-Pacific region in 2007.

Related article: Philippine Phishers Thriving due to Latest Toolkits

» SPAMfighter News - 10/24/2007