Europe Rated the Greatest Spam Generator

Symantec has released its State of Spam Report on February 6, 2008, predicting that the volume of spam would increase during the month with Europe playing a major role, as the continent has been designated as the emperor of spam. Idm.net.au reported this on February 6, 2008.

The State of Spam report notes that the amount of spam mail emanating from Europe currently exceeds the amount arising from North America and that too, by a significant percentage.

Approximately 44% of total spam appears to have arisen from Europe compared to 35.1% from North America. Such has been the trend throughout the past three months starting November 2007. But when in August 2007 Symantec first began recording data for spam, it found that Europe pushed out 30.6% spam messages while North America sent 46% spam.

Later in January 2008, spam with an image attachment accounted for a rate lower than 8% of all spam. Of this, 64% of e-mail ranged from 2KB to 5KB in size but normally, image spam ranges between 10KB and 50KB, a size that can clog any e-mail system

This voluminous increase in spam coming from Europe is substantial but not quite surprising when one considers the huge growth of Internet users in Europe during the past few years. A report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) released in June 2007 indicates that even if the US has the maximum number of Internet users at 66 Million, Europe ranks sixth among the top ten nations with the highest broadband users globally.

The Symantec report also points out that the kind of spam along with its distribution across the Internet poses a significant challenge in locating the individuals behind it. For a lot of spammers manage to redirect spam traffic to a different region leaving their actual location untraceable.

The spammers also employ trojans to send their e-mail that helps them to bypass the Domain Name System (DNS) block lists, allowing them to push out e-mail from Websites sourcing to different regional locations. This means that the place from where spam originates may not necessarily be the place where its senders are based.

Related article: Europe Grabs the Title of "Top Producer of Spam" For H1-2010

» SPAMfighter News - 2/14/2008