Saudi Arabia leads the GCC region as a source of spam, said a spam report from Kaspersky Lab, a major antivirus company.

All the GCC countries combined account for only 1.33% of all global spam. The main reason that there are such low volumes of spam originating in the region is due to the relatively low number of users, said the report.

“The country with biggest population in the region, Saudi Arabia, is a local leader when it comes to sources of spam (0.69%). Even though Saudi Arabia is the most populated county in the Middle East region, its population can’t be compared with that of countries like India and Indonesia. That’s one of the reasons why the amount of spam even from this country is so low. The second reason is that users are careful about protecting their computers,” explained Maria Namestnikova, senior spam analyst at Kaspersky Lab.

Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan: Once again the most populous country of these three is the biggest source of spam. The share of global spam originating from Egypt is 0.22 per cent, whereas the share of spam originating from Lebanon is more than two times less – 0.09 per cent; Jordan accounts for even less – 0.07 per cent.

 “These figures may appear to be unimpressive, but you need to keep in mind that the total amount of spam messages sent daily runs into the billions. So, even small figures such as 0.07 per cent or 0.69 per cent represent a huge amount of mail traffic – not thousands but millions of messages,” added Maria Namestnikova.

In Q3, more than 50 per cent of all spam messages in the world originated from just six countries: India (14.8 per cent), Indonesia (10.6 per cent), Brazil (9.65 per cent), Peru (6.65 per cent), South Korea (5.85 per cent) and Ukraine (3.7 per cent).

All of the countries that make up the TOP 10 sources of spam are situated in South America, Asia and eastern Europe. This is due to the fact that there are numerous users in these countries and they are, for the most part, not very experienced when it comes to IT security. This makes them a soft target for cybercriminals spreading spam-bots.

In Q3, malicious files were found in 5 per cent of all email traffic. Country ratings based on the number of mail antivirus detections show that Russia was the leader, accounting for 9.78 per cent of such detections; the US was rated second in Q3.

“Our mail antivirus made about 1.32 per cent of all global detections in the GCC region. Most of the detections we recorded were on the territory of Saudi Arabia and the UAE,” the report said. – TradeArabia News Service