The 12 Spammiest Countries on Earth
Americans like to associate their spam with other countries. They joke about Chinese spammers, or Nigerians or Russians. It’s a time-honored nativist tradition.
But, according to the new quarterly report from the security and spam monitoring company Sophos, computers inside the United States relay — by far — the most spam. And we have in every quarter of the past year.
To be clear, Sophos doesn’t measure the point of origin for the spam, but something more embarrassing and troubling. Spam is relayed by compromised computers strung into vast networks called botnets. So what we really see here is the deeply insecure state of American computing, more than the number of ne’er-do-wells.
According to the 2013 spam trend report by Kaspersky security, nearly 70 percent of email traffic flow is now spam. (It’s worth looking at Kaspersky’s list of spammy countries by email point of origin: China is number one, but we’re number two.)
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