UK drops out of spam dirty dozen
The top twelve nations for creating and distributing spam emails have been named by security experts.
The UK, which this time last year was number 10 in the list in terms of generating unsolicited email, has dropped to 13th place for the first quarter of 2007, according to statistics compiled by Sophos.
The list is headed by the US, which accounts for nearly 20 per cent of all spam email sent worldwide. China is in secondly place, and Poland surprisingly rounds out the top three.
"Poland has now gate-crashed the top three. The fact that its population, and undoubtedly its number of computers, is much lower than the likes of Russia, India, China and the US, suggests that Polish users need to take a close look at the security holes on their computers," said Carole Theriault, senior security consultant at Sophos.
Sophos also warned about the rise of SMS (short-message service) spam, sent to mobile phones.
"SMS spamming represents a handy new tactic for dodgy marketers - many people are used to ignoring unsolicited email spam, but they don't necessarily expect it to turn up on their mobile handsets," said Theriault.
"Instances of SMS abuse should always be reported to network providers, however it should be noted that while this type of spamming is on the increase, it still represents a tiny problem compared to email spam."
Reproduced from an article published by Webuser
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