US Spam Levels Begin to Recover

The United States spam levels have begun recovering in January which pushed the country back into the list of top 20 spam sources after two months of absence.

According to data from Russian security vendor Kaspersky Lab, the overall amount of spam slightly increased last month by 0.5 percentage points and averaged 77.6% of all email traffic.

Meanwhile, email phishing levels remained low. This type of rogue traffic consisted only 0.03% of all emails sent in January, a decrease of 0.1% compared to December.

The percentage of email messages carrying malicious attachments remained significant at 2.75%, representing an increase of 1% over the last month of 2010.

It's worth noting that the first week of January saw a drastic decrease in spam activity. This period coincided with the Christmas holiday in Russia and other countries from the former Soviet bloc, suggesting that most of the world's spam operations are coordinated from that region.

USA, the long time undisputed spam champion, began loosing ground to countries like India, Russia and Brazil back in September.

In October, the spam output originating from US plummeted, pushing the country in the 18th place. In November and December it didn't even make it to the top 20.

However, it looks like it is making a comeback, as last month it finished in the 14th position, being responsible for 2.07% of the world's spam traffic.

This is still very low compared to its August 2010 score of 15.5%, which was considerably higher than even the 9% attributed to India in January.

India was followed by Russia with 8.2%, Italy with 5.1%, Brazil and Indonesia with 4.3% each, and Great Britain with 3.8%.

When it came to infected emails, US scored higher, being responsible for 8.80% of such emails, after Vietnam (13.70%), India (12.52%) and Russia (9.18%).

"For spammers, December and January was a time of gradual recovery from the anti-spam and anti-botnet campaigns which had such a significant impact on their capabilities.

"Unfortunately, they have been quite successful at restoring their botnets and if no new incidents affect the world of spam in the near future, the volume of unsolicited messages in mail traffic could reach summer 2010 levels by spring," concludes Kaspersky Lab expert Maria Namestnikova.