China cleans up spam problem

26.02.2011
It's been a few years coming, but it looks like China may finally be getting a handle on its spam problem.

Once the largest source of the world's spam, China has been gradually fading off the list of the world's top spam-producers. Right now Cisco Systems' IronPort group ranks it at number 18 in terms of spam-producing countries. That's a big drop from two years ago, when it consistently ranked in the top five.

China is home to more than 420 million Internet users, according to the International Telecommunications Union, and many of them are connecting via hacked computers. Back in 2009, those hacked systems had been pumping out spam at a pretty good clip. In January of that year, China was ranked the number three spam-producing country in the world, according to data compiled by security vendor Sophos.

But by the end of 2009, spam from China started to drop off significantly, according to Chet Wisniewski, a Sophos researcher.

Sophos now ranks China as spam producer number 20, right behind Spain.

"This is the first time in recent memory that China has not been in the top 10," said Cisco Research Fellow Patrick Peterson, in an e-mail interview.