JOIN USAccording to the report, in the second quarter of 2011, spam was sent most actively from developing countries: India (+4.26 percentage points), Brazil (+3.14 percentage points) and Indonesia (+1.66 percentage points).
According to research by Kaspersky Lab, this is due to the presence of millions of unprotected, unpatched machines that can remain active in zombie networks for long periods of time.
"Developing countries are attractive for botmasters due to the absence of effective anti-spam legislation and low IT security levels, while developed countries are of interest because of their fast, widely available Internet connections,” Darya Gudkova, Head of Content Analysis & Research at Kaspersky Lab, said.
The second quarter saw an increase in the number of botnets, although they were all relatively small with none accounting for such large shares of spam traffic as Cutwail or Rustock did in the past.
Either the spammers still haven't increased capacities to where they can send millions of spam emails daily or they are deliberately not risking everything on a single major botnet.
The zombie machines used to spread spam emails are now located in virtually every country of the world.
This signals an end to the spammers' geographical expansion, with no territories now left untouched by the botmasters.
However, malicious attachments were most frequently found in mail traffic received in Russia (12.5 per cent).
The US came second with 12. 21 per cent, an increase of 1.8 percentage points compared with Q1.
Vietnam was third, accounting for 7.43 per cent of all email anti-virus detection activity (+0.46 percentage points).