Sophos: US leads worldwide spam ranking

Lynnfield (MA) - The United States still leads the list of the world’s spam producing countries by a substantial margin, security software company Sophos said today. Enforcement of policies and laws however begin to shift spam production to other nations such as South Korea and China.

There is not much change in Sophos "dirty dozen" list at first sight. 35.7 percent of the world’s spam originates in the US, clearly distancing other nations. South Korea and China, however, are catching up quickly and could grab the little prestigious spam crown sometime in the future. According to Sophos, the percentage of spam produced by the US has fallen 12 percent since January, if compared to other countries. Sophos said it gathered the results from its spam traps, so-called honey pots, from around the Internet.

Gregg Mastoras, security analyst with Sophos, expects this trend to continue : "Many ISPs are enforcing policies to ensure that they do not knowingly provide network services to spammers. Some may speculate that the CAN-SPAM Act has also helped thwart spam, but at this point we haven’t seen any evidence that would correlate the drop off to the Act. Time will tell."

South Korea follows the US in second place with 25.0 percent, China and Hong Kong are in third with 9.7 percent. The ranking also includes France (3.2 percent), Spain (2.7 percent), Canada (2.7 percent), Japan (2.1 percent), Brazil (2.0 percent), UK (1.6 percent), Germany (1.2 percent), Australia (1.2 percent), and Poland (1.2 percent).

"Last month, Sophos estimated that more than 50% of the world’s spam came from zombie computers, which are PCs that have been compromised by hackers or virus writers," said Mastoras. For instance, much of the spam sent from Korea’s computers was attributed to innocent PCs, which had been turned into compromised zombies by spammers from other countries such as China, Russia, and the US. Businesses and computer users must protect themselves from becoming a zombie by having up-to-date anti-virus software, firewalls and Microsoft security patches."

Sophos’ study confirms a trend which antivirus firms have been warning of for several months. The use of zombie computers is believed to be a result of the increasing cooperation between virus writes and spammers. Experts also believe China’s share in spam production to steadily continue. Prominent US spammers such as Alan Ralsky are moving their operations more and more from the North America. In an interview with German weekly "Der Spiegel", Ralsky said Chinese service providers "do not care about US laws."