Symantec says 69 percent of Asian email is spam

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.

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Tagged as: security, software, USA