The “Dirty Dozen” SPAMPIONSHIP: Who needs to kill the most zombies?
Here they are: the latest “Dirty Dozen” SPAMPIONSHIP tables, detailing the globe’s most dastardly distributors of delinquent data during the first quarter of 2015.
If you haven’t seen the Dirty Dozen before, here’s how it works.
SophosLabs maintains a large network ofspamtraps, operated around the world with the express purpose of collecting spam.
And, boy, do they collect spam!
Of course, whenever spam falls into a trap, we can tell where the final step of its journey started by looking at the IP address of the computer from which the offending email was sent.
It’s possible to track back individual IP numbers fairly accurately, sometimes down to a street block, often to a suburb or metro area, and almost always to the sender’s country.
In other words, our spamtraps tell us which countries are the worst senders of spam.
What we’re saying
On a point of order, in case anyone from a Dirty Dozen country should take offence for all the wrong reasons, we’re not saying that the spam senders in our charts are also the worst crooks.
It would certainly be handy for security experts and law enforcement if the senders of spam were the crooks themselves, but that’s not how it works.
Crooks mostly gave up sending spam themselves years ago: they’re more likely to get blocked if all their spam comes pouring out of their own servers, and more likely to get caught.
What the crooks like to do instead do is to infect you with zombie malware, which gives them remote control over your computer.
Once they can order your computer around from afar, they send it commands tostart spamming for them.
→ To understand how a crook can send commands to your computer remotely even if you have a firewall or a router that blocks all inbound connections, read our explanatory article, How bots and zombies work, and why you should care, or listen to our Techknow podcast, Understanding Botnets.
You pay for spam with your computer’s processing power, with your internet bandwidth, and – because you’re the person whose IP number shows up in the spamtraps – with your reputation.
So if you’re in the Dirty Dozen, you may not be a crook yourself.
But you’re helping crooks out, even if you don’t realise it.
The SPAMPIONSHIP results
With that clarification out of the way, here are the results, which we jokingly refer to as the SPAMPIONSHIP, for Q1 (January-February-March) of 2015
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