Between 2005 and 2006, the number of unsolicited emails increased 147 percent, says Postini Inc., the world’s largest spam-filtering company. This means that for each welcome e-mail, 14 junk messages show up too. To visualize the intensity of attacks, Postini mapped the suspected origins of 1,010,186,128 spam emails intercepted on December 18, 2006 (above).
1 YOU ARE SPAMMING YOURSELF RIGHT NOW About 74.4 percent of all spam came from Internet addresses in the United States. Why? Spammers infect unprotected personal computers with viruses to do their dirty work. More computers with high-speed Internet connections mean more raw material for spammers. Criminals link hijacked personal computers together to form “botnets”—clusters of infected PCs that spammers can control from anywhere in the world.
2 MADE IN TAIWAN Taiwan, a country with weakly enforced spam laws, proved to be a major source of Internet mayhem. By setting up “honeypots”—dummy computers that spammers unknowingly ...
