Symantec says 69 percent of Asian email is spam

Posted Friday, 23 March 2007, 10:46 HST @782

According to a new study by Symantec on March 19, the developer of the Norton software range, 69 percent of all email messages sent from Asia are spam.

The volume XI report and a summary are available as PDF files. A Flash presentation with audio narration is also available.

The Phillipines has the worst percentage score, as 88% of that country’s email messages are unsolicitied commercial email (UCE or spam). China accounts for the largest volume of spam messages.

The Symantec Internet Security Threat Report also includes a new section on underground economy servers: systems that help organized crime sell stolen information. It’s an online identity theft swap meet, and 51% of these computers are located in the USA. US banks issues 86% of the debit and credit cards found on these networks. The US also leads the world in phishing sites, account for 46% of the global numbers.

Government is the number one target for identity thieves, accounting for 25 percent of the data breaches reported to Symantec.

Home users are the number one target by far, accounting for 93% of all reported attacks. As always, I advise home broadband users to buy a router and reset the default address and passwords. This step alone can repel a large number of simple attacks.

Beijing is the number one city in terms of zombie computers, accounting for 5% of the worldwide total. China accounts for 26% of the worldwide total. Bot infections are up 11% over the previous year, for an average of 63912 active zombie computers per day.

Symantec collects data from 120 million users of the company’s software, 2 million honeypot e-mail accounts and 40000 network traffic sensors.

The threat report is an interesting source of information, but it’s also a sales tool for the company, so take these figures with a grain of salt.