by Playfuls Staff |
25th July 2006
No matter what the authorities do about it, it seems that the spam phenomenon in the US cannot be defeated.[more]
E-mail spam is a subset of spam that involves sending nearly identical messages to thousands (or millions) of recipients by E-mail. Perpetrators of such spam ("spammers") often harvest addresses of prospective recipients from Usenet postings or from web pages, obtain them from databases, or simply guess them by using common names and domains. By popular definition, spam occurs without the permission of the recipients.
Sending spam violates the Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) of almost all Internet Service Providers, and can lead to the termination of the sender's account. Many jurisdictions, such as the United States of America, which regulates via the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, regard spamming as a crime or as an actionable tort.
The US authorities have failed in reducing the number of spam sent on the Internet, for the first time in two years. The US now “boasts” with 23.2% of the world's spam in Q2 2006.
The “competing” countries are China and South Korea in this order, but the good news is that they have managed to lower the level of spam they emitted in the first and second quarter of 2006. The top of world spammers was built by UK-based security company Sophos.
According to Sophos, most of the world’s spam comes from “zombies” or “bots,” or computers that have been hijacked by spammers via Trojan horses, worms or other malware, for the purpose of distributed unsolicited messages.
During Q2 2006, Europe overtook North America as a spreader of spam, with an increase of 2.1 percentage points over the quarter leaving it responsible for 27.1 per cent of global spam in Q2 2006.
“It’s disappointing to see the United States lose some of its momentum in the war against spam; U.S. spam has declined every quarter since the inception of CAN-SPAM until now,” said Ron O’Brien, Sophos senior security analyst, in a release. “With a concerted focus on regulatory action and judicial punishment, the United States must now intensify its efforts to educate computer users on preventative security measures to curb the infestation of zombie computer.”
"Since the introduction of the CAN-SPAM [Act] in 2004, we've seen a regular quarter-on-quarter drop in the proportion of spam coming from the U.S.," said Graham Cluley, Sophos senior technology consultant, in a statement. "Until now, that is. Perhaps the reality is that the statistics can't be reduced any further unless U.S. home users take action to secure their computers and put a halt to the zombie PC problem."
"It's worrying to see so many pump-and-dump e-mails," Cluley said. "The people that act upon these e-mails aren't skilled investors, and don't realize that purchasing the shares is likely to reap no reward, benefiting only the spammers."
There's also been a growth in spam messages designed to inflate the value of company stock (so called pump and dump spam) which currently accounts for 15 per cent of spam messages compared to just 0.8 per cent in January 2005.
Russia, which is in the top 10 at piracy, is not present in the top 10 of spammers but Sophos says Russian spammers control vast networks of compromised (zombie) PCs in other countries.
Sophos states that they have noticed an increase in spam containing embedded images, up from 18.2 per cent in January to 35.9 per cent in June, a ruse designed to fool some anti-spam filters that rely on the analysis of textual spam.
The top looks like this:
• United States: 23.2 percent
• China (including Hong Kong): 20 percent
• South Korea: 7.5 percent
• France: 5.2 percent
• Spain: 4.8 percent
• Poland: 3.6 percent
• Brazil: 3.1 percent
• Italy: 3 percent
• Germany: 2.5 percent
• United Kingdom: 1.8 percent
• Taiwan: 1.7 percent
• Japan: 1.6 percent
• Others: 22 percent
