Does your daily routine include deleting the entire contents of your junk folder? Missing out just one day can send them full to overflowing, and there’s no reliable way to stop them. Even e-mail spam filters can’t keep up with the surge, and I occasionally get messages mixed up with the junk.
This week Sophos released a list of the top spam-producing countries in the world. This report named the United States to be the world’s largest producer of junk e-mails, producing 21.6 percent of the total. China ranked second, though they’ve managed to lower the amount they send out by nearly seven percent. The UK managed to drop off the top twelve list, though Israel makes an entrance at the eleventh spot.
- United States (21.6%)
- China (inc. Hong Kong) (13.4%)
- France (6.3%)
- South Korea (6.3%)
- Spain (5.8%)
- Poland (4.8%)
- Brazil (4.7%)
- Italy (4.3%)
- Germany (3.0%)
- Taiwan (2.0%)
- Israel (1.8%)
- Japan (1.7%)
- Others (24.3%)
What caused the increase? Well, there’s SpamThru which came out these past two months. SpamThru’s unique method of infecting and using an antivirus to get rid of any malware in the system guaranteed its survival in the wild. And then there’s been several variants of the Stratio worm that’s been making its way around this quarter. When you think about it, the junk mail you get is just a symptom of the bigger problem of bot infections and network vulnerability. These days they’ve added malware to their bag of tricks to gain your computer. Most junk e-mailers attack unprotected computers and control them without their users knowing. These hackers do it by using vulnerabilities in the computer’s operating system. Until they can be completely stopped, we’ll just have to include deleting spam mail in our daily activities.
[tags]spam, top twelve[/spam]