Spammers take remote control of innocent computers around the world
to send junk email.
IT security and control firm Sophos has revealed the top ten
countries relaying the most spam per capita. The top three
spam-relaying countries - the United States, Russia and China -
which accounted for 33.8
percent of all spam in Q4 2007, are notably absent from the
chart.
The following shows the top ten countries based on spam emitted
per capita:
1. The Pitcairn Islands
2. Niue
3. Tokelau
4. Anguilla
5. The Faroe Islands
6. Monaco
7. Bermuda
8. Falkland Islands
9. Andorra
10. Aruba
When the top three spam-relaying countries are considered in
terms of population, the United States is in 64th position, Russia
in 45th, and China plummets to 132nd.
"Between October-December 2007, the US relayed far more spam
than any other country due to the sheer number of computers in the
country that had been taken over by remote hackers," said Carole Theriault, senior
security consultant at Sophos. "But when measuring spam emitted per
capita, the results are very different. Most of the countries in
this chart have very small populations compared to the usual
offenders, but their totals are sky high when it comes to spam
emitted on a per-person basis. Just because your PC is located on a
remote island in the South Pacific doesn't mean it's not
contributing to the global spam problem. All computer users,
wherever they are in the world, need to wake up to the threats and
ensure their PCs are properly protected."
The changing positions of other top spam-relaying countries when
looking at them from a spam-per-person perspective are as
follows:
- The United Kingdom drops from 9th to
50th
- Canada drops from 26th to 89th
- Japan drops from 32nd to 136th
- Australia drops from 33rd to 85th
Recently, Sophos published
its annual Security Threat Report, which discussed the ways in
which financially-motivated cybercriminals use compromised
computers to relay their spam messages around the world.
Sophos recommends that all computer users protect their
desktops, gateways and servers with IT security
solutions that provide automatically updated protection against
viruses, spyware, hackers, and spam.
Sophos is headquartered in Boston, US and Oxford, UK. More information is available at www.sophos.com.