14 DAY TRIAL // The top position in the spam producer list is occupied again by the Americans. The results of a thorough analysis carried out by Sophos on the Internet traffic during January and March 2005 showed that 35.7% of the total unwanted messages were exported by the United States.
Sophos Labs researchers have examined spam messages from different spam traps that have been active during the test. According to the results obtained from the analysis of the email traffic, a hierarchy of the most active spam producers has been obtained: United States, South Korea, China, France, Spain, Japan, Brazil, Great Britain, Germany, Australia and Poland.
Sophos announces that for last month, half of the worldwide spam traffic was generated by zombie computers. These systems have been infiltrated by hackers through worms and viruses, says Gregg Mastoras, senior security analyst within Sophos.
The most numerous innocent generators of spam are the Koreans who have been converted without their consent to this practice by hackers from China, Russia and the United States. Considering this massive recruiting of simple users that generate spam, Korea has succeeded in obtaining the second position with a quota of almost 25% of the total spam traffic.
The Americans, who are the biggest spam producers of unwanted messages, have settled down during January-March 2005 compared to previous studies, the figures indicating a 12 % decrease.
The spam has already reached alarming rates, 95% of the total emails are unwanted mail and the new methods of taking over zombie computers and sending messages to ISP through anonymous proxies lead to increasing rate of spam infestation.