US Still Number One for Spam

By Greg McNevin

October 29, 2007: According to the security firm Sophos, the US has held on to its position as the world’s top spammer despite increasing arrests and convictions of known spammers.

The firm’s quarterly spam report has again pegged the US as top dog in the “Dirty Dozen”, a list of countries from which the bulk of the world’s spam email originates from.

The US isn’t just winning the battle by a small margin either. Sophos found that a hefty 28.4 percent of all spam comes out of the US, that’s almost a third of all spam and definitely the lion’s share considering second place went to South Korea with 5.2 percent. China, Russia and Brazil took out 3rd, 4th and 5th place with 4.9, 4.4 and 3.7 percent respectively.

“It seems as though a major American spammer is arrested every other week at the moment but, despite these high-profile law-breakers being put away, the U.S. continues to relay far more spam than any other nation on the planet,” said Sophos security consultant Carole Theriault in a statement.

“This level of activity can't be attributed solely to the slick operations of a few cash-hungry criminals. The problem is there are thousands of spammers using many thousands of compromised zombie computers in the U.S.,” she added.

In the form of advice to curtail spam levels, the firm claims more must be done by U.S. authorities to educate users and ensure ISPs step up their monitoring efforts to identify machines compromised by botnets used by spammers.

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