Sophos finds a new spam site every three seconds for three months

IT security company Sophos published the results of a new study, detailing the volume of spam and the distribution of its sources. Their research team monitored spam email and related websites for the first three months of 2008, using the company's global network of spam traps. The main findings: 92.3% of all email was spam and, in addition, they identified 3,300 new spam-related web pages every day, or one every three seconds.

Regarding geographic distribution of spam sources, the USA and Russia take the leading places, with respectively 15.4% and 7.4% of all spam messages originating from computers on their territory. Surprisingly, the third most significant spam source was Turkey, responsible for 5.9% of spam messages, followed by China, with 5.5%. It should be noted, however, that this does not mean that every 20th spam message is intended for a Turkish audience -- spam is predominantly directed to rich Western countries, and most of it originates from global networks of infected PCs, or "bot-nets."

Sophos experts noted that by inserting hyperlinks into their messages, spammers hope to avoid spam filters and trick computer users into visiting the webpage and subsequently infecting their PCs.

An earlier study of the Google Anti-Malware Team pointed to the USA, Russia, and China as the countries responsible for hosting the majority of websites that attempt to infect computers with malware. The hundreds of thousands "drive-by download" sites were on found to be on 500 "autonomous systems", or individual hosting companies and their clients.