USA still king of the spammers

Pesky septics flood your inbox

The United States is responsible for nearly one in five junk emails, accounting for 18.6 per cent of all spam messages sent, according to industry insecurity outfit Sophos.

Sophos also says that the nature of the spam being distributed is becoming more malicious.

It may be that more US computers are compromised by spamming rings, and pump out the spam without the owners' knowledge.

In its spam survey covering the back end of 2010, the UK decreased its percentage of total spam output compared to the third quarter of the year - from 5 per cent to 4.54 per cent - but remains in fifth place overall.

The fact that some 36 million Americans are reported to purchase drugs from unlicensed online sellers may have something to do with spammers' success, Sophos notes. It seems they can't get it up like they used to.

Here's Sophos' top 12 spam-relaying countries for October to December 2010:

1.      USA             18.83%
2.      India              6.88%
3.      Brazil             5.04%
4.      Russia           4.64%
5.      UK                 4.54%
6.      France           3.45%
7.      Italy                3.17%
8.      South Korea  3.01%
9.      Germany        2.99%
10.     Vietnam         2.79%
11.     Romania       2.25%
12.     Spain            2.24%
Other                   40.17%

"Spam is certainly here to stay, however the motivations and the methods are continuing to change in order to reap the greatest rewards for the spammers," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos. "What's becoming even more prevalent is the mailing of links to poisoned web pages - victims are tricked into clicking a link in an email, and then led to a site that attacks their computer with exploits or attempts to implant fake anti-virus software."

He adds: "As long as spammers continue to make money from these schemes, Internet users can be sure that they'll continue to receive unsolicited emails and social networking scams. To combat this, it's essential that computer users remain wary of clicking on unknown links, regardless of whether they appear to be on a trusted contact's social networking page."

The "dirty dozen" report can be found on Sophos' Naked Security site here.