China takes first place in email spam

CHINESE MEDIA have proudly reported that Hong Kong earned the highest email spam honour of any country or region in the world, in a report published by computing insecurity firm Symantec.

The latest Messagelabs Intelligence Report for May 2009 revealed that the volume of spam increased 5.1 per cent over the previous month to 90.4 per cent worldwide.

Hong Kong email spam levels grew by 2.4 per cent in May to reach 92.3 per cent, according to the report. In comparison, spam levels were 86.6 per cent in the US and 90.3 per cent in the UK. The report also said that some form of computer virus infected one in every 198.3 emails throughout China overall.

Paul Wood of Symantec indicated that 2009 has seen CAPTCHA-breaking, social networking spam and webmail spam techniques combined. "Today, the bad guys are using the three together as a triple threat to heighten the effectiveness of their spamming," he said.

The majority of small businesses in China are not affected by spam however, because they are small market stalls that sell everything from food and clothing to knock-offs of western consumer goods and illegally-copied software and entertainment CDs and DVDs.

The computers used in those multitudes of small Chinese businesses are impervious to email spam because they are abacuses, which of course are completely spam-proof. µ