UK Climbs To No.4 Position Among Most Spammed Countries

According to Symantec the security vendor, which published the latest statistics, cyber-criminals are gaining control over increasing number of contaminated computers across the United Kingdom for producing massive amounts of destructive junk e-mails.

States the report, during August 2010, the country ranked No.4 in generating the maximum number of spam mails across the world. Moreover, there has been a cent percent growth in the total volume of spam mails from huge networks of compromised systems here.

Accordingly, U.K is currently pushing 4.5% of the global junk messages that lists it among the Top Ten spam sending countries across the globe trailing USA, India and Brazil.

Other countries with the same kind of increases as in the United Kingdom have been France, Italy and Germany, suggesting that out of the ten most prolific spam generating nations, four are from Western Europe.

Disturbingly, although the spammers have been handling infected computers of a smaller percentage, they've managed towards raising the total volume of junk e-mails. This implies that during any 24-hour time span, spam generated is 6% more than that of any earlier month.

Furthermore, it has been observed that major botnets like Rustock are exploiting an unprecedented number of home PCs, putting world consumers in a serious hazard. Globally, botnet activities have increased far more compared to any earlier period, accounting for nearly the entire spam being dispatched. In fact, 95% of all inbound e-mails for users are spam, indicating a significant growth from 84% during April 2010.

Commented Paul Wood, Senior Analyst at Symantec that albeit it was clearly evident that United Kingdom was getting to be an extremely preferred country for spam attacks, there wasn't any solid rationale regarding why spammers were selecting UK computers to build botnets and unleash spam runs. Shop Safe published this in news.

Mr. Wood further stated that probably U.K consumers just didn't know about the prevalent risks and thought their online shopping was safe without taking infection threats on board. Besides, numerous people lacked the proper programs that would detect potential infection on their PCs without which safety was little assured, he added.

Related article: US Passes Baton to Asia in Spam Relay

» SPAMfighter News - 8/31/2010