CRN Network, Oct. 10 2008, 1130 hrs
According to Trend Micro, India is the seventh largest spam sender in the world. It is the leader among Asian countries in spam, accounting for more than 4 percent of the total global spam. It is ahead of other Asian countries such as China (3.39 percent), Republic of Korea (2.57 percent) and Thailand (2.04 percent). Asia contributes 16.57 percent of the global spam volume.
According to Trend Micro, an electronic message is spam if the recipient's personal identity and context are irrelevant; the recipient has not verifiably granted deliberate, explicit, and still-revocable permission for it to be sent and the transmission and reception of the message appears to the recipient to give a disproportionate benefit to the sender.
Niraj Kaushik, Country Manager, India and Saarc, Trend Micro said, “Since 2003, the volumes of spam have been growing steadily, now reaching in excess of 80 percent of all Internet traffic. The rapid growth of broadband connections and the use of virus distribution by spam have created large collections of ‘Zombie’ machines on broadband networks sitting ready to serve the needs of the spammer. The amount of spam globally today has reached a whopping 66, 470, 097.”
Globally, the Russian Federation heads the list of spammers accounting for more than 11 percent of total spam, followed by the United States of America at 9.36 percent. Trend Micro reports that the Bric countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) together account for around 20 percent of all spam. Experts at Trend Micro further indicate that spam from emerging markets will continue to grow till the proper Internet infrastructure is in place. The world’s top 10 spam relaying countries account for about 57.4 percent of the global spam volumes.
Elaborating on how to effectively fight spam, Kaushik said, “The most effective solutions against spam combine a strong reputation system with a comprehensive filtering system that includes heuristics, statistical analysis, signature filters, and multi-lingual detection. The key lies in security solutions that keep user systems updated in real-time. Trend Micro’s worry-free security solutions provide multi-layer spam protection by blocking spam ‘in-the-cloud’ itself before it reaches corporate networks.” |