US No Longer Leading the World In Spam

darthcamaro writes "America is no longer the spam king. According to Cisco, US-originated spam dropped by over two trillion messages — American-based IP addresses sent about 6.2 trillion spam messages. The new world leader is Brazil at 7.7 trillion messages. 'I'm not completely surprised to see US falling to number two in the spam stats, but I didn't expect it to happen yet,' said Cisco Fellow Patrick Peterson. 'I was really gratified to see the actual spam volume decrease, not just ranking, but we [also] decreased the amount of spam that is pouring out of the United States.'" The drop in US spam might have had something to do with the temporary shutdown of the McColo spam ISP.

Comments

Congratulations are in order ?

[damn_registrars]

Clearly, this shows that the oft-suggested tactic of countering spam with fines, kidnapping, prison, and murder, is working extremely well. Just look at how we are no longer the top country for spam to originate from!

Except that of course it is well known that most spam is pumped out of botnets. And the botnets are usually spread out all over the world. Really, this just tells us that less spamming botnet activity is coming from the US than Brazil in that particular observed time frame. This could be attributed to any of a number of factors.

A little trick I like to call "math"...

[mea37]

"The drop in US spam might have had something to do with the temporary shutdown of the McColo spam ISP"

Oh, really?

According to the very links kdawson uses to back this idea up, the botnet was off line for what, maybe 2 weeks... out of a 52 week year. So if they accoutned for all of the US spam, that outage would result in a drop of 4%.

But looking at the other numbers in TFS, it looks like there was in fact a drop of something like 25%.

So yes, it may have had something to do with it. In the same sense that the increase in temperature in my house may have had something to do with letting the dog back in (but probably had more to do with having the furnace repaired).

Re:Offtopic- Are we getting more mod points?

[CorporateSuit]

I always figure when I get 15 mod points, it's slashdot's way of telling me to stop posting and start reading.