America! Stop helping spam spread and clean up your computers!

SophosLabs published some research today revealing that one in six spam emails are being relayed from compromised computers (which are part of hacker-controlled botnets) in the United States.

Interestingly China and Russia seem to be sliding down the dirty dozen list, in terms of the proportion of the world’s spam that they are responsible for relaying.

Here are the statistics for April-June 2009:

So much attention is given by the-powers-that-be to the threat of cyberterrorists and rogue states launching attacks, but the fact is that it could be your sister-in-law Sandra who is helping the spammers without her knowledge, because her home PC is not properly defended.

And, of course, spam is not the only output from these compromised PCs. They can also be used to spread malware, steal identities and launch distributed denial-of-service attacks – all without the knowledge of the computer owner who doesn’t even realise that their computer is infected.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is an award-winning keynote speaker who has given presentations around the world about cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. A veteran of the computer security industry since the early 1990s, he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows, makes regular media appearances, and is the co-host of the popular "Smashing Security" podcast. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, or drop him an email.