Indians world's no. 1 spammers

Indians world's no. 1 spammers
June 18, 2010
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Anirudh Bhattacharyya

NEW YORK:

That email offer for a bulk discount on Viagra or for millions from a Nigerian benefactor clogging up your inbox may actually have emanated pretty close to home.

According to a series of recent report by Internet security companies, India may have become the top nation from where spam originates.

After tracking over 3 million spam messages for the week ending June 13, the Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvaniabased ICSA Labs found that the maximum number, 424,224 or 14 per cent of the total, originated from India.

The second biggest source was Russia with 11.5 per cent.

India also topped ICSA Labs' list of Top 10 Countries Sending Spam the week before that.

While analysts have questioned the fact that China does not figure in that Top 10 list, there is consensus that India is, at the very least, among the top three nations spewing spam.

This is not an isolated finding. According to the latest statistic featured by Project Honey Pot, the top country where spam servers are located is India, accounting for 16.9 per cent, with Brazil a distant second at 8.7 per cent. In the last seven days, India's share actually rose to 18 per cent. The share of countries where spam has traditionally been known to originate from, like China, has dropped, though that country still remains at Number One in Project Honey Pot's all time list, Project Honey Pot's attempts to identify spammers and spambots and was created by the Utah-based Unspam Technologies, Inc.

These reports have also been corroborated leading experts in the field. Dave Rand, TrendMicro's Chief Technology Officer for Content Security, said, " It's a fact, there are more and more compromised computers in India." The Cupertino, California-based firm specializes in Internet security suites including anti-virus and antispyware software.

Rand pointed out that with in just the last six months, they had detected nearly "100,000 new infected computers on one network alone." "It's a big deal,"he said.