[kictanet] African broadband boost spurs rise in spam output

[alice]

Story URL: 
<http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/networking/2010/05/27/african-broadband-boost-spurs-rise-in-spam-output-40089071/> 

(Link to the report 
<http://www.messagelabs.co.uk/mlireport/MLI_2010_05_May_FINAL_EN.pdf> 
Africa from page 8)

African broadband boost spurs rise in spam output
By Matthew Broersma, 27 May 2010 16:48

An undersea cable laid off the coast of east Africa last year has led to 
a boom in spam coming from the region, according to a new study from 
Symantec.

A cable laid last summer boosted the broadband connectivity to countries 
along the country's eastern coast in July last year, Symantec noted in 
its May 2010 MessageLabs Intelligence Report, published on Wednesday. 
The consequent rise in broadband availability has given spammers access 
to a new source of machines for their botnets, it said.

"Historically, broadband adoption has been a tipping point for spammers 
to acquire more bots," said MessageLabs analyst Paul Wood, in a 
statement. "The new undersea fibre optic cable along the east coast of 
Africa has enabled rapid growth in the number of users obtaining 
high-speed connections to the internet, creating a great opportunity for 
attackers to infect new machines and create new bots."

There has been a significant rise in spam coming from Kenya, Rwanda and 
Uganda, Symantec said. Spam output from those east African countries has 
risen by 7.2, 6.3 and 5.7 times, respectively, compared with levels seen 
a year ago.

The more you know about the likely avenues of cybercrime attack, the 
better you can protect yourself against them, says Alan Calder

While the majority of African spam still originates from outside of the 
eastern region, the new cable boosted eastern Africa's proportion of the 
continent's spam to 19 percent, up from 13 percent. Meanwhile, the 
proportion of spam coming from the rest of Africa decreased from 86 
percent to 80 percent, Symantec said.

Overall, spam originating from Africa rose by 1.2 billion junk messages 
per day. Africa now originates three percent of spam worldwide, up from 
just under two percent a year ago, according to the report.

Earlier this week, VeriSign iDefense reported that botnets are available 
for hire for as little as $8.94 (£6.04) per hour, emphasising how little 
financial muscle or technical expertise is needed to carry out attacks.

Worldwide, the Symantec study found that in May phishing scam emails 
accounted for one in 237.1 emails, or 0.42 percent, up 0.2 percentage 
points on April. Phishing emails represented 80.6 percent of all 
email-borne threats, up 10.3 percentage points on April.

The UK remained the country against which the most phishing attacks were 
directed, with one in 121.8 phishing emails aimed at British systems, 
Symantec said.