Russia and China the new Spam Superpowers

I made an outlandish statement more than a year ago. I said Russia is one of the most prolific countries at spewing out spam, malware and other serious threats to the sanity of the internet. SOPHOS has now confirmed what I already knew. SOPHOS, a leading security firm has just published its latest report on the twelve worst spamming countries in the world: Russia emerges as spam superpower, as Asia and Europe overtake North America.

Even more compelling than Russia's rapid rise to infamy, is the fact that North America, the previous spam king, has fallen to number three in the spam spewing global community. Asia takes the top spot, followed closely by Europe.

Read the rest of my article here.

 

The United States has more computers and networks than any other country, but per capita sends out less spam than most.

Among the several networks/servers I manage, the spam volume is highest from Russia, China, Turkey and several other countries. More important than the volume of spam is the volume of spam compared to legitimate email originating from the same countries.

On my networks, emails originating from Russia are 99.9% spam. The same is true of China and Turkey. Emails originating from the USA are less than 11% spam. These are highly telling statistics. If I get 100,000 emails from Russia and 99,900 of them are spam it is a bigger problem than getting 900,000 emails from the USA and having 99,000 of them be spam.

 

The poverty rate is also probably much higher in those countries. People without a dependable source of income tend to be the type that will use any tool to try to get money from others. But I am a bit surprised that Turkey is tops on the list. I guess the societies that are more open to western influence also are a breeding ground for these spammers.

 

IMHO Turkey's rate is coming from spambots. My observations is that 9 of 10 computer is infected(spy or trojan or both) in Turkey. Also there are some malwares that use Turkish language for social engineering.

 

I don't know whether I would go as high as 9 out of 10, but it is significant. There are also some known spam gangs operating in Turkey.