Rejected E-mails Enabled China Overtake US in Spam Generation

According to UK-based security software provider iCritical, as spam originating in massive volume from the Far East and China, more concerns will emerge for the companies already pushing hard to manage unsolicited e-mails.

The most recent statistics from the company show at least a doubling of e-mails originated from the Chinese IP addresses, which company servers had rejected or prevented from reaching customer accounts. This doubling occurred from 10.4 Million to 22.9 Million over November-December 2008. During the same period, similar e-mails from Vietnam increased from 2.9 Million to 4.7 Million and for South Korea from 6.2 Million to 7.8 Million.

Moreover, the firm found that the total number of illegitimate e-mails emerging from the US, UK, Brazil, Turkey and Russia, other biggest spam-relaying nations, declined considerably in Q4 2008.

Statistics from iCritical also show that the total number of spam from all the 8 nations dropped from 137.5 Million to 72.3 Million during October-December 2008. This suggests the impact due to the shutdown of McColo and the teeming botnets the ISP hosted had been greater than what some people had forecasted. Moreover, the US spam dropped successively from 47.3 Million to 19.7 Million to 13.8 Million over October-November-December 2008. All this, according to iCritical, resulted in China surpassing the US to become the greatest spam-producing country.

Andy Calvert, Technical Director of iCritical, says that the figures demonstrate in what manner concerted strategies of law-enforcement across the nation could make a remarkable positive impact. At the same time, they also suggest the extent of difficulty law-enforcement agencies encounter at the global level as spam spreads beyond national frontiers, as reported by SCMAGAZINE on February 5, 2009.

Calvert further said that while the Far East was marketing itself as an inexpensive alternative to the West with regard to outsourcing of IT services, it had still not imbibed the same sophistication level in e-mail and web security as Europe and America did. Also, numerous new Internet users in Asia surfed on the Internet, often ignorant that their computers could be compromised and this enabled spammers to amass mini-host systems through the exploitation of vulnerable targets.

Related article: Recruitment of ‘Money Mules’ – New Way To Phish

» SPAMfighter News - 2/21/2009