|
By Cara Garretson
Residents in states with a high concentration of small and
medium-sized businesses are targeted most by spammers, according to
security experts. For September, Idaho has won the dubious distinction
of being the most-spammed state.
This is according to a recent report by e-mail security vendor
MessageLabs, a Symantec subsidiary that analyzes billions of inbound
messages collected by its data centers around the world.
The report reveals that 93.8 percent of e-mail sent to
residents of Idaho is spam; the least-spammed territory is Puerto Rico,
with only 83.1 percent. The U.S. national average is 93.8 percent,
according to the report, which is significantly higher than the global
rate of 86.4 percent.
These findings represent a shift in targets, since the three
most-spammed states this month -- Kentucky and New Jersey are second
and third, respectively -- were among the ten least-spammed sates in
2008.
By comparison, spam makes up 86.4 percent of all e-mail
messages sent to residents of Canada, and the average number of spam
messages received per user per day is 49.
Regardless of which state they live in, U.S. residents are receiving more unwanted e-mail than ever.
"Spammers have taken full advantage of both the economic
uncertainty of some and the trustworthiness of others for their own
rewards," writes Paul Wood, senior analyst for MessageLabs
Intelligence, in the report. "No state is immune to the affects of
spam."
The company says the overall rise in spam is due in part to
the credit crisis that started toward the end of 2008 and the ensuing
economic uncertainty that spurred spammers to try to take advantage of
more e-mail users with bogus financial offers.
In addition to finding that small and medium-sized businesses
are popular targets for spam, the company also determined that
organizations operating in several U.S. industries are also in
spammers' sights: marketing, wholesale, recreation, engineering and
real estate. The least-spammed industries are chemical and
pharmaceutical, followed by agriculture, public sector, transportation
and healthcare.
Globally, 87 percent of all spam was sent from compromised PCs
that have been taken over by malware and turned into spam servers
without their owners knowing it. MessageLabs puts the number of PCs
that make up these botnets at between 4 million and 6 million globally,
and they send out, on average, 151 billion messages every day.
The rise in popularity of social networking sites such as
Facebook and Twitter is contributing to the growth of these botnets,
which significantly enhances spammers' ability to send unwanted
messages.
Many social networking sites have fallen victim to worms such as Koobface
that embed links to malicious Web sites in legitimate-looking posts and
comments, tricking users into clicking on URLs that bring them to sites
where botnet malware is distributed -- often without the user ever
knowing it.
Only registered users can write comments.
Please login or register. |
