14 DAY TRIAL // In this year's April, it was established that the US is the country with the highest spam production. The statistics, carried out by Sophos for the January-March period, confirmed then that the US had exported approximately 35.7% of the total unwanted messages.
Most of the times, in order to generate these enormous quantities of spam, the so called zombie systems were used. These zombie computers are compromised by hackers using worms and viruses, and then are used to continuously send spam type messages.
Since then, the situation hasn't changed much in terms of hierarchy, the only difference being the decrease of US' "spam share" from 35.7% in April to 26%. If we look into the figures published by Sophos last year, which said that the American computers generated approximately 42% of the entire spam quantity, the decreasing trend is even more obvious.
The Americans are starting to face heavy competition from China and South Korea, which possess an important number of broadband type connections. The percentage of spam produced by the South-Koreans has increased over the last year by 12%, reaching now almost 20% of the entire spam production. The Chinese have also exceeded the 16% threshold. And that is somehow logical if we consider that it has the highest number of Internet users.
This is how the top of the five biggest spam producers looks like:
US - 26.35 % South Korea - 19.73 % China - 15.70 % France - 3.46 % Brazil - 2.67 %