India becomes top spamming country

“If you have a spam in your inbox, there’s an almost one in ten chance that it was relayed from an Indian computer,” says Sophos’ Graham Cluley.

According to the latest stats by the security company, India has overtaken the US and has become the top spam-relayer country in the world.

With 9.3 percent of all spam coming from computers located within its borders, India is followed by the US (8.3 percent), South Korea (5.7 percent), Indonesia and Russia (both 5 percent).

The shift is thought to be due to the fact that more first-time Internet users get online in growing economies, but are unaware of the need of keeping their machines clean with antivirus solutions and unfamiliar with a lot of online scams that lead to malware infection and to the computer becoming a spam-relaying machine.

Sophos’ researchers say that, all in all, the global amount of spam emails sent every day is in decline because spammers have discovered better platforms for targeting users: Facebook, Twitter and (lately) Pinterest. Also, ISPs around the world are becoming better at detecting and blocking regular, email spam.

Unfortunately, no matter how good the news is about the decline of spamming, the numbers for email phishing attempts and malware-laden emails are rising, so there is a whole new set of approaches that users must learn to detect.