US and China Top List of Spam-Relaying Countries

jcatcw writes "On Thursday Sophos released a new set of global statistics pointing out the biggest spam relaying countries in the world. Toping the list between April and June of this year were the US and China. 'Sophos senior security consultant Carole Theriault said that while the U.S. remains the top spam dog, there results show an urgent need for countries to join together and take global action. "Once a machine is compromised, it is often used to send out spam for a variety of campaigns," she said. "In a matter of seconds, we can see compromised systems send messages on a dozen different topics from stock scams to diet drugs." Paul Ducklin, Sophos Asia Pacific head of technology, said that spammers are ready to "borrow" any computer illegally to send e-mail regardless of the location.'"

Comments

Instead of Top Overall

[Nom du Keyboard]

Instead of just giving a top overall count of who's sending spam, how about a figure weighted by how many connected computers are in the country overall? If China sends a bit less than the USA, but the USA has 10X as many broadband connected computers, then Chinese computers are far more vulnerable to this sort of activity, and focus preventative measures there to mitigate the problem. Under those circumstances, the USA problem might be dealt with in a different way than the Chinese problem, but without this curcial information, who knows?