Not the dirty dozen
SophosLabs regularly publishes information about the âDirty Dozenâ spamming countries, but for me just as interesting is the bottom of the list. Let me explain. We collect millions of spam messages every day and as part of our analysis we look at the IP address sending the message, we can then look up that address to see which country it has been allocated to. That way we can see which countries send the most spam.
However the report we have in SophosLabs lists all the unique countries, the usual suspects of USA, China are at the top most months, with some interesting changes. But what I find interesting is to take a look at the bottom of the list, there are countries or territories that Iâve never heard of (but there again Geography was not my best subject at school).
For example currently bottom of the list at 240 is Norfolk Island (which has the domain extension NF), which according to Wikipedia is a territory of Australia and has an estimated population of 1,853 in 2003. Although judging by the lack of spam (1 message in the past week), the level of computer ownership is very low.
What of course I can’t tell, is how much spam the people of Norfolk Island receive.
Posted on May 24th, 2007 by Mark Harris, VP of SophosLabsFiled under: General, Spam
Windows 7 security - A great leap forward or business as usual?
