It might seem rather harsh to say that junk mail tends to emerge from certain countries but a recent study has confirmed that this is indeed the case.
The person who carried out the investigation is based in the Netherlands and he discovered that around half of the junk mail which is out and about on the internet comes from just 20 internet service providers.
Some of the Worst Countries
He checked out over 42,000 ISPs to reach this conclusions and some of the figures are quite astonishing. For example, the ISP called Spectranet covers Nigeria and 62% of all of their addresses send out spam messages. Apart from Nigeria, Vietnam, Brazil and India are other countries which have been pinpointed as being big sources of dodgy mails.
Giovane Cesar Moreira Moura did his investigative work at the University of Twente and he realised that some networks are simply the equivalent of bad neighbourhoods in the real world, due to the dense concentration of illegal activity there.
His work also helped show that certain networks seem to specialise is certain types of span. For example, most phishing attempts originate in the US, while spam often comes from an Asian based ISP.
Of course, the ISP the spam or other malicious activity comes from might not be its original source, as many internet criminals weave a clever web across the globe to hide their true location.
He pointed out that security engineers could help lower the rate of internet attacks by first of all looking at the ISPs where most of the malicious activity starts. Security tools which look at emails to see if they are junk messages could also perform better if they had the details about how good or bad an ISP has been historically.
