Sophos points out that \u201cIndia is home to 5.3% of the world’s internet users, making it the third most connected country, after China and the US,\u201d although Sophos also points out an interesting disparity: \u201cAt the same time, only 10.2% of the country’s population uses the internet, which equates to a dearth of security measures to protect the region’s computers.\u201d<\/p>\n

These facts, combined with the fact that the country also has 1.2 billion people, it\u2019s not a stretch that the country represents a top source of spam. In fact, India has topped the Sophos list before,<\/a> albeit in the first quarter of this year, it came in at a more conservative 9.3% of the world\u2019s spam production.<\/p>\n

But Wait! There\u2019s More!<\/strong><\/h2>\n

A key fact begins to unravel the news. Sophos points out that while the source may be India, \u201cthe numbers suggest that many of the country’s ill-protected machines have been turned into spam-spitting zombies in botnets.\u201d In fact, it\u2019s even the case that India is a victim, not just in the zombieism that\u2019s turned the country\u2019s computers into some other spammers\u2019 bitches, but also in the fact that Indian computers are the target of online threats as well, according to Sophos.<\/p>\n

Also notable in the list are the high (#2) ranking of Italy and the first time Saudi Arabia has shown up on Sophos\u2019 radar, coming in at #4. Drawing from the Sophos study, The Business Standard points out<\/a> that this \u201cis likely caused by the Festi botnet which successfully infected many computers there in August and then used the computers to swamp the rest of the world with large quantities of spam.\u201d Additional newbies to the list including Turkey and Germany, and countries like Pakistan, Russia, and Poland have dropped off the list this quarter.<\/p>\n

If there\u2019s any takeaway here, it\u2019s that these lists are exceptionally deceiving (not Sophos, just the lists) in representing where the world\u2019s spam is really coming from, and that usually equates to the spammers just getting smarter. They\u2019re using botnets and any number of other circuitous methods to work their black magic. As such, it\u2019s practically impossible to determine where the spam is really coming from, and that just sucks, because it means stopping them has become that much more difficult.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s face it: spam is an international business, and in the same way that the Internet tore down borders and made the world a global village, new technology and changing laws have made spam production a moving target. All you can do is continue to filter it, keep your users well-informed, and hope for the best.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s been a long tradition, or at least it seems that way, of certain countries carrying the dubious honor of being responsible for<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":459,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,14],"tags":[11,9,10,8,7],"class_list":["post-457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-security","category-spam","tag-allspammedup","tag-bot","tag-botnet","tag-malware","tag-spam","jsn-master"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hidefideas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hidefideas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hidefideas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hidefideas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hidefideas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=457"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/hidefideas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1784,"href":"https:\/\/hidefideas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457\/revisions\/1784"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hidefideas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hidefideas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hidefideas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hidefideas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}