Singapore ranks 42nd in spam relaying

Sophos reported Asia is the leading relaying continent with Singapore spreading .55% of world’s spam.

IT security and control firm Sophos has published its latest report into the top spam relaying countries, covering the first quarter of 2010. The United States of America continues its unpopular reign as the king of spam, relaying more than 13 percent of global spam, accounting for hundreds of millions of junk messages every day.

However, most dramatically, China - often blamed for cybercrime by other countries - has completely disappeared from the so-called "dirty dozen", coming in at 15th place with responsibility for relaying just 1.9% of the world's spam.

Spam accounts for a staggering 97 percent of all email received by business email servers, putting both a strain on resources and wasting a huge amount of time to lost productivity. Used largely as a method for selling counterfeit or illicit goods such as fake pharmaceuticals, luxury watches and false diplomas, virtually all spam comes from malware infected computers (called bots, or zombies) that are controlled by 'botherder' cybercriminals.

Computer users can unwittingly allow their PCs to become part of a botnet in a number of ways, including clicking on malicious links that are frequently contained within the spam messages that the botnets are used to distribute. The only way for users and administrators to reduce the risk of being compromised is to run anti-spam and anti-malware protection and ensure all software and hardware is up to date with security patches.

By continent, Asia continues to dominate in spam, with more than a third of the world's unsolicited junk email relayed by the region. Although the US remains the top offender by country, North America as a whole has reduced its spam throughput since last quarter, dropping from second to third place.