The state of spam
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Blog, Spam, email, Internet on
Symantec has just published the latest State of Spam Report and it highlights a rather worrying trend: namely a shift in the origination of spam from North America to EMEA. Indeed, the percentage of spam originating in the EMEA region by volume has now surpassed that of North America which has traditionally been at the heart of spam distribution.
This has not just happened in January alone, which the report covers in detail, but has been noted for the last three months in total. However, in January Symantec observes that around 44% of all spam email is coming from Europe compared to just 35% heading out of North America.
Mind you, Symantec also admits that the very nature of the spammer means that it is actually rather difficult to pinpoint the geographic origin of spam with 100% accuracy. Spammers do everything they can to obscure this fact, after all they don’t want law enforcement to track them down or DNS block lists either.
One thing I can agree with Symantec on regarding the European spam issue is that it is most likely to be increase broadband usages that is driving the trend. Look at the figures and you discover that when it comes to the number of broadband users globally, Europe has much of the top ten list wrapped up. The last stats that I saw, which are six months old now, had 6 out of the top ten countries for broadband use being located in Europe.
That said, when you consider the penetration of super-fast broadband, and we are talking 100Mb/sec speeds here, in Asian countries such as Korea, Japan and Singapore, it is somewhat surprising that Symantec reports only 15% of spam originating from that continent. So maybe the broadband thing is a bit of a red herring after all…
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