Roughly 26 percent of all spam comes from U.S. computers, according to the company, which studied worldwide spam production over the last six months. The amount marks quite a drop from the same period in 2004, however, when Sophos reported the U.S. was responsible for 42 percent of the world’s spam.
“It has been lowering for awhile” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos. “One is the anti-spam task forces and the authorities and the ISPs in North America are getting much better at putting into practice methods that are lowering the amount of spam.”
But Cluley also said the drop was due to growth of the Internet in other countries, specifically in South Korea and China, where the relative newness of the market lends itself to spam abuses.
South Korea now accounts for 20 percent of global spam, up from 12 percent last year, and China nearly doubled its contribution as well, going from 9 percent to 16 percent during the same period.
The end result, said Cluley, is that the amount of spam throughout the world is still about the same as it was in 2004.
According to the Sophos study, the top five spam producers in the world are:
1. United States - 26.35 percent
2. South Korea - 19.73 percent
3. China - 15.70 percent
4. France - 3.46 percent
5. Brazil - 2.67 percent
