Who’s sending us Spam?

Today we want to approach the spam from another point of view. We’re not going to show you the latest techniques to distribute spam or the different types of spam we can find. We’re going to talk about spam figures.

Many of you have probably wondered: Where does the spam come from? Who sends it? Why is there such a huge amount of spam circulating?

We’ll try to answer you these questions in this post.

First of all, let’s start with the following data: only in January and February 2010 PandaLabs has analyzed nearly 5 million spam messages.

In order to collect these messages, we have some mail servers designed to catch spam, called “spamtraps”. Then, the messages are processed and we obtain the IP address of origin of the message, that is, the IP address of the computer from which this spam was sent. We can geolocate this IP address, being able to calculate its approximate position in the world.

Another amazing data: the spam analyzed during these two months came from a total of almost one million different IP addresses. This shows that the spam is mostly sent from zombie computers belonging to a botnet.

This way, the computers of the infected users themselves are those which send the spam. The cybercrooks have thousands of computers at their disposal which do the dirty work for them.

Which are the most spamming countries?

According to the data we’ve analyzed during these months, Brazil, India and Republic of Korea head the ranking of countries from which most spam was sent during the first two months of 2010.

Spam is nothing but a business and is used primarily either to distribute malware or sell/advertise all type of products. Therefore, as long as there are users, no matter if they are few, who trust these messages, it’s enough to continue betting on it.

Next week, we’ll publish the PandaLabs Report belonging to the first quarter of 2010. Among its content, you’ll find a section where you can get more information about spam including the data of March as well.