Security news10 March 2008
Pitcairn Islands relays most spam per person, reveals Sophos Top three spam-relaying countries take a back seat when spam volume per capita is measured
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:
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:
- 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.
- Download "Sophos Security Threat Report 2008"
- Download the podcast on the Security Threat Report 2008
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.
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About Sophos
More than 100 million users in 150 countries rely on Sophos as the best protection against complex threats and data loss. Sophos is committed to providing security and data protection solutions that are simple to manage, deploy and use and that deliver the industry's lowest total cost of ownership. Sophos offers award-winning encryption, endpoint security, web, email, and network access control solutions backed by SophosLabs - a global network of threat intelligence centers. With more than two decades of experience, Sophos is regarded as a leader in security and data protection by top analyst firms and has received many industry awards.
Sophos is headquartered in Boston, US and Oxford, UK. More information is available at www.sophos.com.
