Prepare yourself for the results of the latest Spampionship. SophosLabs conducted a study calculating the "Dirty Dozen" spam sending countries.

How Do Spammers Get Into My Device?

United States, Belarus, and India take the leading three spots on the "Dirty Dozen" list for countries that send the most amount of spam; consistent with what SophosLabs has seen this past year. Countries on this list aren't necessarily spammers, but they are spam senders. Spam senders and spammers are two different things.

Spammers usually don't send their own spam in bulk because it makes them easy to identify. Out of the ten million unwanted emails they attempt to send, one million could get sent before either recipients or data centers start resisting. At this point, spammers are blocked from using the servers and sending the remaining emails.

Not surprisingly, spammers have gotten smarter in orchestrating their campaigns. Spam is circulated through the botnet, or robot network. The botnet is an unsuspecting group of sneakily cooperating "zombie" computers that receive instructions from servers that crooks control. These criminals send a list of emails to all the bots in the network and order the botnet to start a spam campaign. This method allows spammers to send a greater number of emails at a less obvious pattern to those wary of spam in the first place.

Some users may consciously participate in spamming activity, but most spam senders have no idea they're involved. There's an important lesson to be learned here: inaction in the face of spam threats only helps spammers make money. To be part of the solution to this problem, you have to clean up the spambot malware on your own computer first.

And The Winner Is…

The US has consistently topped the charts for the Spampionship. Italy and China are also within the top five "Dirty Dozen." The study argues that countries with the highest rankings have large populations, so you'd expect to see them at the top.

SophosLabs also released a per capita comparison of spam-sending countries to the United States. It divided each country's spam total by its population and subsequently divided every country's spam-per-person value by the figure for America. Several smaller countries are in spotlight in the per capita chart. For instance, the average computer in Belarus is eleven times more likely to send spam if it were in the US, while Uruguay is almost five times more likely.

What to Do in the Face of Spam

Go ahead and chuckle at the Spampionship—I certainly did. However, the takeaway from this is a serious one. It's crucial to protect your information from cybercriminals and prevent your data from getting hacked. Invest in and regularly update antivirus software, such as our Editors' Choices Bitdefender Antivirus Plus (2014) or Norton AntiVirus (2014). Set up your home Wi-Fi to WPA or WPA2 to secure your wireless computer networks. Utilize password managers, such as LastPass 2.0 or Dashlane 2.0, in order to generate and store strong passwords for every website. Don't be lazy about security; perpetrators will take any chance they get to steal your data.

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