Spam may be the bane of our cyber-existence, but
there are geographic considerations
that go into producing it. One way security companies guard clients against junk mail and other attacks is by blocking IP
where
has been known to originate. When too many IP
get
in one place, spammers pack up and move to a neighboring country and keep going. By looking at IP blacklist data, we can see one such dance taking place in eastern Europe earlier this year. In January, only about 5% of IP
in Belarus were being blocked, a number
that rose to almost 30% in May. The same study, produced by international message security company Cloudmark, points out
that Romania currently has the most
IP
of any country. Spammers probably switched to using IP
in nearby Belarus and Russia to get around the problem, causing the spike in
Belarusian addresses. But then hosting companies in those countries wised up, implemented tighter restrictions, and forced them back to Romania’s more permissive hosts, which caused Belarusian IP blocks to drop back to normal levels in May. It’s difficult to assess
output because
there are multiple ways to measure it: You can look at it in terms of how many
messages are produced, how many IP
are blocked, or the percentage of
in a given country, to control for population. Many sources cite the three countries with the largest populations, China, India and the U.S., as the origins for the majority of spam. This makes some amount of sense, but it doesn’t tell the full story unless you adjust the data for population and number of allocated IP addresses.Read Full Story