Most spammed town in UK revealed

Davey Winder
Thursday, 25 September 2008 18:39

Business IT - Security

Ever wondered why the spammers seem to target you? Does it make you think you might need some help in the bedroom after all, or perhaps a fake Rolex would look good on your wrist? Relax, you could just be living in the wrong town...

You might imagine that London would be the biggest British target for spammers, what with it being the multi-cultural and business hub of the country. Yet London only ranked 28th in the most spammed places list compiled by messaging security outfit MessageLabs which was published today.

Other big cities fared just as well in keeping the spammers at bay, relatively speaking. In fact none of the UK's biggest cities could manage to make an appearance in within the top 25.

London was the highest placed of these, with Manchester way back in 81st place, Leeds coming in 91st, Liverpool 99th, Newcastle 166th and Bristol 167th.

The statistics were based upon a spam per business user basis, looking at the total number of junk messages targeting individuals by geographic location every day. By averaging the figures MessageLabs could produce a most targeted towns top 10 listing.

So while it is something of a given that larger cities will attract the highest total number of spams, looking more closely at per user per town targeting yields some interesting results.

Matt Sergeant, a senior anti-spam technologist at MessageLabs explains "by breaking statistics down to an average number per business user... we can start to identify problem areas and analyse why businesses in different areas and industries are receiving more malicious emails than others.”

Why should anyone care? Sergeant has that covered as well: “businesses operating outside of major towns and cities are usually small and mid size companies with less time and resources to devote to IT security."

Although I am still unsure why knowing you work in a spam hotspot is going to help you much, unless you relocate to Fareham where two spams per week is the norm. Frankly, I doubt many will be contemplating that.

Then again, I doubted anyone ever bought anything being sold via spam and I was wrong.

Anyway, where are the worst places to work in the UK when it comes to being spammed then? According to MessageLabs, and in reverse order, the top 10 most spammed places in the UK are:

10 – St Peter’s Port, Guernsey
9  – Colchester, Essex
8  – Bradford, West Yorkshire
7  – Dundee, Scotland
6  – Macclesfield, Cheshire
5  – Sutton, Greater London
4  – Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands
3  – Petersfield, Hampshire
2  – Alton, Hampshire
1  – Egham, Surrey

Business users in Egham are apparently on the wrong end of an average 189 spams every day, users in Alton and Petersfield get 167 and 116 respectively.

Of course, it could be worse, you could live in the spam capital of the world, France.