2011-03-01
Abstract
China slides down the rankings of top spam-producing countries.
Copyright © 2011 Virus Bulletin
Once the number one source of spam in the world, China appears to be slipping down the list of the world’s top spam-producing countries.
While just two years ago the country consistently featured in lists of the top five spam-producing countries, China is currently ranked at number 18 by Cisco Systems’ IronPort group and at number 20 by Sophos.
There are a number of factors that may have contributed to the decrease in spam coming from the country. China launched an anti-spam initiative in 2006 that brought together network operators and security companies to address the problem, but the most dramatic drop in spam levels wasn’t seen until towards the end of 2009. There is also an ongoing joint initiative between US spam fighters and the Internet Society of China which aims to set standards and determine ways in which the two countries can cooperate on tackling the problem (a report is due out on the project’s progress later this month). According to Cisco, ISPs in China have become better at working with customers to reduce the spam problem, and the country’s new, tougher regulations for registering Internet domains and controls over who is allowed to send email may also have helped bring spam volumes down.
While this is good news for China, it appears that many of the spammers who had been sending their emails from China have simply moved their operations to other countries (for example Russia), where Internet controls and anti-spam regulations are slack enough to allow them to continue.
