United States Ranked Number One for Relaying Spam, Sophos Reports

October 14, 2010

Tools

One in five spam messages sent from United States; one in 20 from UK

BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- IT security and control firm Sophos has published its latest report on the ‘Dirty Dozen’ spam-relaying countries, covering the third quarter of 2010. Since the second quarter of this year, the spam output from the United States has increased significantly from 15.2% to 18.6% of global spam, making the country responsible for nearly one in five junk emails, and meaning that the United States contributes nearly 2.5 times more spam than the next worse offender, India.

The UK finds itself dropping one position since the previous quarter – from fourth to fifth place – and is now responsible for relaying 5% of all spam.

The Top 12 Spam-relaying Countries, July to September 2010:

1.	United States	18.6%
2.	India	7.6%
3.	Brazil	5.7%
4.	France	5.4%
5.	UK	5.0%
6.	Germany	3.4%
=7.	Russia	3.0%
=7.	South Korea	3.0%
9.	Vietnam	2.9%
10.	Italy	2.8%
11.	Romania	2.3%
12.	Spain	1.8%

Other		38.5%

Top Spam-relaying Continents, July to September 2010:

Europe		33.1%
Asia		30.0%
North America		22.3%
South America		11.5%
Africa		2.3%

Other		0.8%

Almost all of this spam comes from malware-infected computers (known as bots or zombies) that are being controlled by ‘botherder’ cybercriminals. One of the primary tactics used by cybercriminals to grow botnets involves tricking computer users into clicking malicious links – either contained in spam email or social networking messages – which direct computers to malware infected webpages.

“Spam isn’t just a nuisance, it’s used by cybercriminals as a means of growing their operations,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos. “You should never even be tempted to open a spam message out of curiosity, as it can only take a second to effectively hand over control of your computer to the spammers. If your computer does become part of a botnet, you’re also inviting further malware infections, which may compromise your personal or banking information.”

Sophos also notes a rise in social networking spam during Q3 2010, with the widely reported ‘onMouseOver’ exploit creating spam tweets on Twitter, and a raft of Facebook scams that have been created by spammers to generate money from survey websites.

“What’s interesting about the Facebook scams is that they exploit human weaknesses to spread,” added Cluley. “Unfortunately, these scams continue to proliferate, with new ones springing up every day.”

The best way for computer users to reduce the risk of being compromised is to run anti-spam and anti-malware protection, behave sensibly when online, and ensure systems are up-to-date with security patches.

Sophos recommends that companies automatically update their corporate virus protection, and run a consolidated solution at their email and web gateways to defend against spam and viruses.

Further information about the latest Dirty Dozen report can be found on Graham Cluley’s blog.

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.