Contrary to some popular notions, this report claims that spam originates evenly from three geographic areas: the Americas are responsible for about 35% of spam, versus 32% from Europe and 28% from Asia. About 58% of all spam comes from known botnets evenly distributed around the globe, although the botnet known as Donbot is alone responsible for 18%.

A botnet is a (usually) large group of computers that are all infected with virus, worm, or Trojan horse software under a command-and-control infrastructure. The originator, or “bot herder” issues commands to the infected “Zombie” computers to send or relay spam messages, as well as send out copies of the infected software in an attempt to gain control of additional, weakly-secured computers. It has been estimated that nearly one-quarter of all computers on the Internet are infected Zombies.

What can you do about all this? Not a great deal, unfortunately. Using anti-virus and anti-spam software, and updating it regularly, is the only way of combatting the flood of Internet spam and malware. In addition, most ISPs implement anti-malware software on their email servers — Google’s gMail service features one of the better anti-malware software suites.

But the bad guys are still out there, and they’re very busy. It pays to be vigilant, folks.

In 2001, spam accounted for about five per cent of the traffic on the Internet; by 2004, that figure had risen to more than seventy per cent. This year, in some regions, it has edged above ninety per cent — more than a hundred billion unsolicited messages clogging the arterial passages of the world’s computer networks every day. The flow of spam is often seasonal. It slows in the spring, and then, in the month that technology specialists call “black September” — when hundreds of thousands of students return to college, many armed with new computers and access to fast Internet connections — the levels rise sharply.

Hat tip to goodexperience.com.

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