South Korea & China source of 51 percent of spam

Stuart Corner
Monday, 12 September 2005 17:43

IT Industry - Strategy

According to Trend Micro's August 2005 Virus Roundup, Asia has become the world's main source of spam with 31 percent of spam emails originating from South Korea and another 21 percent from China, which was third overall after the US with 25 percent.  Language-wise, most spam emails are still written in English (75 percent), but Chinese is now the second most common language (14 percent), followed by Japanese (6 percent) and Korean (1 percent).
Last week Symantec published its ranking of locations worldwide by the number of bot-infected computers. It put Seoul in third place with four percent of the total, but offered no reason why the top two places were held by two UK towns: Winsford and Cambridge with populations of just 33,000 and 110,000 respectively. Trend Micro found that of all spam email detected in August, the financial category was the leader with 36 percent, followed by the 'adult' category with 19 percent.
Trend Micro also warned that, increasingly spam messages were being sent loaded with a wide range of malwares, including worms, trojans, spyware and bot programs. "The difficulty in preventing these types of attacks lies in the fact that most companies rely primarily on anti-spam software, which is generally incapable of stopping malicious Internet attacks," it warned.