U.S. Top Spammer Again

The United States has again ranked top spammer in a recent study on spam origins. The complete list is as follows.

United States
South Korea
China
France
Brazil
Canada
Taiwan
Spain
Japan
United Kingdom

While the U.S. is still on top, its prominence in spamming seems to be on a decline. The most recent evidence indicates it's at fault for about one fourth of all junk email. A similar study conducted last year placed responsibility on the U.S. for about four out of every ten spam messages sent.

Part of this diversification may be blamed on the phenomena of spam zombies. Zombies are systems which have been taken over by malicious software, causing them to do their master's biddings. Spam zombies can send spam from nearly any place on behalf of anyone who controls them. Zombies are also sometimes used for other activities of questionable legality such as denial of service attacks.

Spam zombies have also frustrated efforts to block junk mail using DNS based anti-spam email blacklists. Due to the highly distributed nature of zombies, spamming campaigns run by a given organization can spam hundreds or even thousands of different networks.

Increasingly, zombie software is identified by traditional anti-virus packages, and can sometimes be removed. Unfortunately, once a system has been infected, the only way to secure it with full certainty is to format its hard disk and do a complete re-installation. Users simply looking to reduce the impact of zombie spam should install a client-side anti-spam solution package.

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