A billion reasons to be wary of emails from Australia!

Peter Dinham
Tuesday, 07 July 2009 14:35

Business IT - Security

A staggering one billion malicious emails orginate from Australia every day of the week as spammers push out their emails to Internet users, enticing them to buy discounted pharmaceuticals, replica watches, greeting cards, or to sneak a peek at naked pictures of pop star Rhianna.

While there’s also 135,000 senders of malicious emails based in Australia sending out their emails around the globe every month, Australian users are, themselves, a continuing target for international scammers, with a high prevalence of dodgy messages sent from Chinese and Russian URLs.

And, Australia has the dubious honour of currently being the tenth most popular country for hosting spam sites and thirteenth for hosting phishing sites.

What’s more, in its latest report on spam activities around the world, McAfee also says that Australian spammers create more than 35,000 new zombies every month, and the security firm fires a broadside at countries that don’t regulate questionable hosting providers and domain registrars.

A few of the recent top spam subjects in Australia revealed by McAfee include a phishing scam at the head of the list with “a message from St. George,” which McAfee notes is ”an Australian bank”.

On the question of actions by countries to regulate spam and scam emails, McAfee says the long-term economic interests of countries that don’t regulate questionable hosting providers and domain registrars can suffer significantly because of short-sighted policies.

McAfee highlights the fact that spam has a long-term effect on international commerce, occurring when administrators decide to block a sender’s IP based entirely on geolocation—the “from” domain—or by not allowing foreign languages or URLs into their domain.
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