India is top target for spam

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NEWS

India's rapid adoption of new technology has left its PC users struggling to cope with very high levels of spam, according to a report released Wednesday.

Ninety-one percent of email traffic sent to Indian PC users is spam, according to email security company MessageLabs, which warned that the rate of technological advancement has outstripped growth in security awareness.

"There is booming technology in India, but it has been suggested there is little thought for security, which creates a market to exploit that," said Paul Wood, security analyst at MessageLabs.

The majority of junk email still comes from the US, or is generated by American spammers who have moved their operations abroad, said MessageLabs.

"American companies use host services in other countries with laxer spam laws — perhaps a server farm in South America or an ISP in China. Communications between the spammer and the server can be encrypted, so the provider may not know what the server is being used for," said Wood.

The MessageLabs Intelligence Report for February also found that the United Arab Emirates had the highest rate of viruses transmission, with one virus received per 13.9 emails.

"This could be collateral damage of a large viral outbreak local to the region," said Wood.

Talkback

Hello, my name is Mahatma ( Mike Smith when calling the UK ) and I have a free phone for you....

Hip Hip Hooray for spam! hopefully, somebody will soon set up UK call centres and flood India with useless sales calls. All those call centres, that were set up to get around UK Laws and Regulations, have harrassed the UK for too long. Any chance of a few virus' or DoS attacks, with the spam, against their call centres??? By the way, my name is not really Mahatma, I just follow the script ;-)

via Facebook 2 March, 2006 21:59
Reply

Ken,

> All those call centres, that were set up to get around UK Laws and Regulations, have harrassed the UK for too long.

Nope.. weren't set to get around UK laws and regulations. Its just economics - setting up a call centre in India makes a lot of sense, because of low costs and easy availability of highly educated employees.

And no.. the calls might have been made by Indian employees, but the employer is definitely a multi-national, even British, if it matters. So, raise your point with the companies that engage their operations in those call centres, not the countries that host them.

via Facebook 3 March, 2006 01:03
Reply

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