Home PCs Exploited For Spam

"Spammers are motivated by one thing - fast and easy money," said Graham Cluley senior technology consultant for Sophos. "Many spammers have taken their money-making schemes to the extreme by hacking into innocent third-party computers in an effort to do their dirty work."

"Many home users' computers are sending out spam because they have had their broadband Internet connections exploited by remote hackers. Zombie computers - PCs that have been compromised by hackers or virus writers - are sending out over 40% of the world's spam, usually to the complete ignorance of the PC's owner," said Cluley.

The United States is still the country where the most number of spams originate, says a report by security solutions company Sophos.

Researchers at Sophos scanned all spam messages received at its global network of "honeypots" – a system developed by network security firms to track illegal activities on the Internet - throughout 2004. The top of the list was the United States, which is responsible for exporting 42.11% of all spam.

South Korea followed with 13.43 percent of spam originations, China with 8.44, Canada with 5.71, Brazil with 3.34, Japan with 2.57 and France with 1.37 percent. Other counties in the top twelve were Spain, the United Kingdom, Germany, Taiwan and Mexico.

"When we first reported on the top spamming countries back in February 2004, the USA had the excuse that the Can-Spam act had been in existence for a couple of months," said Cluley. "Almost a year and millions of spam messages later, it is quite evident that that the CAN-SPAM legislation has made very little headway in damming the flood of spam."

Sophos notes that the most broadband-connected country in the world, South Korea, has held tightly onto its position as a leading producer of spam.


Sophos recommended that users should avoid purchasing anything that is advertised via spam, and to deploy a "consolidated solution" at the email gateway, which can protect against both spam and viruses.

Author:  

Email:    

Topic:    

Content: