India among top 10 spam sending countries

BANGALORE, INDIA: Secure Computing, a public company that provides enterprise security solution, recently published the Internet Threats Report for the second quarter of 2008.

Among other findings, the report shows that while spam volume and new zombies have decreased in the past quarter, enterprises and home users are increasingly being attacked through malicious Web content and blended security attacks.

According to the report India figures among the top 10 spam sending countries, accounting for nearly 3 per cent of spam sent globally in the second quarter of 2008, says The Economic Times, quoting the report.

The report further notes that spam or unsolicited e-mails sent from emerging markets is expected to grow as the Internet infrastructure improves.

According to Secure Computing, the top 10 countries account for 55 per cent of the world’s spam volume. While US topped the spammers’ list with a 16.56 per cent contribution, Russia comes second with nearly half of that.

The other countries in the list are Turkey, Brazil, Italy and China. India is ranked ninth in the list.

The report states that even though the overall spam volume is up 280 per cent from Q2 2007 to Q2 2008, spam volumes have decreased by 40 per cent this quarter.

Even though both spam and new zombies are down this year, Secure Computing researchers point to other areas that are increasingly problematic.

Male enhancement, product replica and prescription drug spam hold the top three places of types of spam, proving that you can't beat the oldies but goodies, it says.

The report further says that 50 per cent of all websites are now published in languages other than English.

Secure Computing also points to a spam-based email attack that links to new Web-based malware and features news on Angelina Jolie as bait.

On average, about 2.28 per cent of the total global daily email volume contains subjects like “Angelina Jolie naked,” “Angelina Jolie nude movie,” and “Angelina Jolie naked video.”

"We are witnessing change every single day in how the cyber criminals are developing new vectors of attack through spam, malicious Web content, spyware and botnet deployments," said Dmitri Alperovitch, director of intelligence analysis at Secure Computing.

Threats are becoming more and more sophisticated, as recipients of threats are better educated on what to look for.

Users are more cautious and this has led to a rise in more cunning ways to harvest personal information without users' apparent involvement, the report pointed out.