21st Century Learning and Teaching

Spam by volume

For years, the USA has come out at the top of our spam by volume chart.

That has been a simple side-effect of cheap and fast internet access available to a large population that owns lots of computers.

But China has been flirting with top spot for the previous year, and finally cracked that dubious honour in the last quarter of 2014:

Remember, the per-person figures don't tell us which countries have the most spamlords or cybercrooks. If anything, they tell us which countries have the most slapdash attitude to computer security, because the majority of spam is sent by malware-infected computers that send unsolicited emails without their users realising.

Learn more:

- https://gustmees.wordpress.com/2014/02/15/often-asked-questions-who-are-the-countries-with-most-hosted-malware-servers-and-other-cyber-problems/

- http://www.scoop.it/t/securite-pc-et-internet/?tag=Spam

It's once again time for our quarterly Spampionship charts.

We looked at the sending countries for all our spam in the first three months of 2014, and turned the figures into a League Table - the sort of league you don't want to win!...

That's because cybercrooks don't send their own spam: that would be expensive, and easy to track, and would point the finger of law enforcement right back at them.

Instead, the crooks co-opt innocent third parties - like you and me, or our friends and family - to send spam for them.

The criminals use malware-infected computers as remote control "spam robots," better known as bots or zombies, to churn out unwanted and illegal emails on their behalf.

You end up paying for the bandwidth, carrying the risk, and contributing to your country's standing in the Spampionship.

Learn more:

• http://www.scoop.it/t/securite-pc-et-internet/?tag=country
  
• https://gustmees.wordpress.com/2014/02/15/often-asked-questions-who-are-the-countries-with-most-hosted-malware-servers-and-other-cyber-problems/

Unlike conventional sporting events such as the Superbowl, the Six Nations or the Bundesliga, the SPAMPIONSHIP is one title that no team wants to win.

Find out who finished where...

Twitter and its users have perennial problems with spam, as a quick search of Naked Security will reveal.

So you might be surprised that the micro-blogging site's own Twitter identity for report...

Here they are: the latest "Dirty Dozen" SPAM­PION­SHIP tables, detailing the globe's most dastardly distributors of delinquent data during the first quarter of 2015.

If you haven't seen the Dirty Dozen before, here's how it works.

SophosLabs maintains a large network of spamtraps, operated around the world with the express purpose of collecting spam.

And, boy, do they collect spam!

Of course, whenever spam falls into a trap, we can tell where the final step of its journey started by looking at the IP address of the computer from which the offending email was sent.

It's possible to track back individual IP numbers fairly accurately, sometimes down to a street block, often to a suburb or metro area, and almost always to the sender's country.

In other words, our spamtraps tell us which countries are the worst senders of spam.

Learn more:

- http://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-learning-and-teaching/?tag=Spam

- https://gustmeesen.wordpress.com/2012/01/07/pc-security-howto-fight-spam-efficiently/

Our latest quarterly SPAMPIONSHIP charts are out, showing which countries have the most zombies, and therefore send the most spam.

Take a look, and then ask yourself, "What can I do to help?"

Learn more:

- https://gustmees.wordpress.com/2014/02/15/often-asked-questions-who-are-the-countries-with-most-hosted-malware-servers-and-other-cyber-problems/

- http://gustmeesen.wordpress.com/2012/01/07/pc-security-howto-fight-spam-efficiently/

SophosLabs revealed the Dirty Dozen top spam-relaying nations, as it published the final “Spampionship” league table of 2013.

Once again,...

Spammers don't send spam themselves: they use botnets, or "zombie armies", of malware-infected computers to distribute their spam for them, almost always without the owners of the infected computers being aware.

A spam campaign that seems to originate from a whole raft of different security and anti-virus companies...

...is actually an effort to trick to into installing a new variant of Zbot/Zeus onto y...

Once every three months, we tot up our country-by-country spamtrap statistics for the previous quarter and calculate the Dirty Dozen.

Of course, this is one "competition" in which getting promot...