Asia-Pacific and Japan threaten to dethrone Emea as spam king

Europe, Middle East and Africa's (Emea) position as the "King of Spam" is under threat by Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ) and South America after a 28 per cent decline in spam, which is a six per cent fall since June.

According to Symantec's State of Spam report in November, Europe was crowned the new "King of Spam" in February 2008, with about 44 per cent of all spam reportedly originating there, compared to 35.1 per cent coming from North America.

However, according to the latest report, Emea's position is under threat.

APJ and South America have now passed North America with 23 per cent and 22 per cent spam coming from that region respectively. Twenty per cent of all spam now originates from North America – a five per cent fall since June 2009. The increase in spam from South America and APJ is significant but not surprising when you consider the massive growth of internet in these regions during the past few years.

In October, spam made up 87 per cent of all e-mail messages. The most notable highlight in November was the growth of spam from APJ (23 per cent) and South America (22 per cent), with a corresponding decline in spam coming from Emea (28 per cent) and North America (20 per cent).

With respect to spam categories, internet spam rose by seven per cent and now accounts for 39 per cent of all spam messages.

This category includes degree spam, which this month dominates the top 50 spam subject lines.

The report also indicated that spam levels have increased dramatically since February 2008.

In that month's report, spam levels reached 78.5 per cent of all e-mail traffic during January 2008. This contrasts sharply with what was observed in October 2009, as spam levels hit 93 per cent, and averaged at 87 per cent of all e-mail messages.

Distribution networks are becoming more dynamic as additional broadband connected targets are coming online every day.

Distribution paths are also getting complicated with spammers now sending messages directly from infected machines, routing through compromised relays and continuing to use webmail/SMTP Auth abuse.

Botnets continue to jockey for position after shutdowns such as McColo. The number of botnets is set to grow as hackers target developing IT infrastructures in certain regions such as APJ and South America.

When the country ranking for origin of spam for June 2009 is compared with October 2009, it can be seen that nations such as India, Taiwan, Thailand and Chile have risen several places.

Vietnam jumped 13 spot and is now the third most spamming country.

It should be noted that the nature of spam and its distribution on the internet presents challenges in identifying the location of the people sending the messages. Many spammers redirect attention away from their actual geographic location.

Malware also played an active role in October 2009, an average of 1.9 per cent of all spam messages contained malware.

This equates to a 0.6 per cent increase from September 2009 when the number of messages containing malware hit a maximum of 4.5 per cent of all spam.

As reported in October 2009 State of Spam Report, this increase in malware is significant when 87 per cent of all e-mail messages in October 2009 were spam and the increased message size of spam e-mails that have attached malware may also be significant.

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