By
Keyvan Nayyeri
One of the important aspects of our work on a spam filter service is, keep track of statistics of what is going on around the service and users. One point about the spammers that we’re all certain about is their country of origin because we have experienced that there are a few countries that stay at the top of the stack, and there are only those few countries that send most of the spams.
Unfortunately it’s not easy to calculate the real statistics for these countries based on the data that we receive because all spammers pretend their characteristics when they send spam content. However, from the words and languages that they use in their spam content as well as the origin of their domain names, it’s possible to elicit general statistics about these spammers, and we’ve been able to find these statistics on Waegis, too!
A part of the results (that come in a moment) would be predictable for everyone but a part of that would very interesting for you (as it was for us).
There are four countries that play the major role in spamming. The top spammer country, as you can guess, is the United States of America where over 70% of spam posts are coming, and the second country is Russia where something around 10-15% of items are originated. While these two countries would be known to you, the third and fourth places belong to China and Iran with 8-10% and 5% respectively.
I think that the results of the United States, Russia and China were predictable for many web users but you would be surprised by the results for Iran. Yes, that is a concealed fact about Iranian spammers that they send a huge number of spam items to emails, sites, blogs and forums.
Another interesting fact is that all the countries except Iran use their native language when they send spam items, and Iranian spammers are the only spammers that send their items in English language. This would be one of the reasons that other spam filter services have not been able to catch them in their statistics.
I personally was suspicious about Iranian spammers because I had seen the names and words that they were using in their items but I could be assured this fact when I found two other evidences. Firstly I was seeing a huge number of spams with Persian names and words in my email junk that had the same characteristics as those that were appearing on Waegis. Secondly I finally found the evidence that some Iranian Waegis spammers are using local Iranian domains to send their items.
Of course, knowing the origin of spammers can help us find better methods to defeat them, and also can help us move toward the goal of legislating better laws against spammers which is the most effective method to ban them.
In the end, I would say that because of abovementioned reasons these statistics are approximate and there would be a slight difference between the real data and what is presented here but the general order and role of the countries should be constant. We’ll keep aggregating the statistics to do a better examination on the origin of spammers in the future.
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