Why is Spam So High in Russia?
Welcome back to Gauravonomics Blog! Subscribe to my feed now and you'll never miss a single post!
Over the last week, reposts of a rather misleading Trend Micro press release on on spam in BRIC countries1 kept showing up in my Google Alert feed for “BRIC + Internet”. The press release and most of the news articles quoting it verbatim focus on the high incidence of spam in BRIC countries. However, even some cursory math showed me that the incidence of spam in BRIC countries is not unusual: BRIC countries account for 28.5% of the world’s internet users and 27.1% of the world’s spam (according to Trend Micro). In fact, two other reports from Sophos2 and Secure Computing3 peg the contribution of BRIC countries to worldwide spam at 19.7% and 18.5% respectively.
If you compare the three sets of data, three trends emerge strongly –
- USA still remains (one of) the largest contributors of worldwide spam, which is understandable given its high internet user base.
- China’s contribution to worldwide spam is disproportionately low, perhaps because of its strict censorship regime.
- Russia’s contribution to worldwide spam is disproportionately high, so much so that Russia is being called the “spam superpower of the world”4 5.
The question to ask, however, is: why is spam so high in Russia?
It seems that there aren’t any easy answers to that question. Russia is also prominent for other types of Internet criminality, such as malware and exploits, partly due to the notorious Russian Business Network4 and it seems that spam is part of a larger internet related malaise in Russia. Also, the high spam figures partly reflect the number of compromised botnet PCs in Russia that have been hijacked as relays, and do not simply reflect the amount of spam that actually originates in the country4 5. Still, almost 85% of all e-mails in Russia are spam and almost 80% of all spam in Russia is in the Russian language6. What’s more, these percentages are likely to become even higher in the near future, given the state of affairs in Russia.
The next question to ask, then, is: what does this level of spam mean for the Russian social web?
References
- 1 India is the number one spamming nation in Asia, says Trend Micro, October 8, 2008.
- 2 New spam-related webpage found almost every three seconds, Sophos reports, April 14, 2008.
- 3 Secure Computing Internet Threat Report, Q2 2008
- 4 Russia becomes spam superpower, John E Dunn, Techworld, February 12, 2008.
- 5 Russia emerges as spam superpower, as Asia and Europe overtake North America, Sophos reports, February 11, 2008.
- 6 Spam evolution: January-June 2008, by Darya Gudkova, Kaspersky Lab, September 24, 2008.