21st Century Learning and Teaching

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/

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