Most of the world's spam comes from these two superpowers

By Sead Fadilpašić
published

One of them distributes significantly more spam than the other.

Email warning
(Image credit: Shutterstock)

The US is, hands down, the world's biggest distributor of spam email (opens in new tab), according to a new report from Atlas VPN. Analyzing all spam email messages sent across the world in the last six months,  the VPN (opens in new tab) firm found that almost half of it – 44% - originated in the United States.

Russia is the second biggest spam distributor, accounting for nearly a tenth of all spam messages sent out in the last 180 days, with Germany a close third with just below 8%. 

Despite its Great Firewall and the national policy of being detached from the rest of the (digital) world, China still managed to take up just above 3% of the infamous market share.

Email attacks

In order to break down the contents of these emails for its report (opens in new tab), Atlas VPN took a closer look at a sample of 24,265 spam emails that were sent over a period of two weeks. Most (6,171, or 25%) were harmless ad emails. 

The majority of hurtful emails - 5,699 – were phishing attacks. In these messages, which made up almost a quarter (23%) of the emails analyzed for the period, the recipients are enticed to click a seemingly innocent link or download an email attachment, through which they’d be giving login credentials to some of their online services to the attackers.

Another 1,783 emails, or 7%, were blackmail, while 594, or 2%, were scam emails. Of all the malicious attachments circulating in these emails, 182 of them (1%) were archives. These were also the most common type of attachments, as well.

Email is still considered one of the most popular attack vectors (opens in new tab), for various reasons such as its popularity in both private and business matters, as well as the fact that it’s cheap and simple to operate. Attackers prey on overworked, reckless and overly trusting individuals, having them download malware (opens in new tab), or share private or payment information.

Businesses are advised to train their employees on the dangers lurking online, as well as to deploy a respectable email service.

Sead Fadilpašić

Sead is a seasoned freelance journalist based in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He writes about IT (cloud, IoT, 5G, VPN) and cybersecurity (ransomware, data breaches, laws and regulations). In his career, spanning more than a decade, he’s written for numerous media outlets, including Al Jazeera Balkans. He’s also held several modules on content writing for Represent Communications.

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