A survey has revealed that half of all spam mail is sent from just 20 ISPs, with these so called ‘bad neighbourhoods’ being spread across the world.
The study, by a Dutch researcher, surveyed 42,201 ISPs in a bid to track where junk mail is sent from. Often having terribly constructed text or content stolen from other sites, spam and phishing is still a leading annoyance to search engine optimisation marketers and the wider public.
Whilst spam is global, researcher Giovan Moreira Moura found some interesting trends.
For example, when he classed the neighbourhoods as bad or not, he showed that some areas are more likely of malicious activity than others. He also found certain peaks.
Particularly high levels of this spurious activity were found in Brazil, India and Vietnam. One item in the survey will not surprise many in the UK; The most crime-ridden network was in Nigeria, with 62% of all address on Spectranet, found to be sending out spam.
The US was the hotspot for phishing scams, however, showing that online attacks are very much subject to cultural differences than anything else.
The data found by Moreira Moura is being used as part of a wider study to reduce malicious traffic. Writing in his paper, he said:
“If security engineers want to reduce the incidence of attacks on the internet, they should start by tackling networks where attacks are more frequently originated.”
One idea being developed is to create a filter which restricts traffic from certain areas of the net. Using tools which can also check for plagiarised SEO content could also go some way to helping with the issue.
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