Top 10 Most Spammed States

Written by Sue Walsh on August 10, 2010

A new spam statistics report is out that names the top 10 most spammed states. Let’s take a look:

  1. North Carolina-91.3
  2. New Hampshire-91.3%
  3. Washington-91.3%
  4. Utah- 91.5%
  5. Illinois-91.8%
  6. Tennessee-92.1%
  7. Indiana-92.7%
  8. South Carolina-93.6%
  9. Alabama- 94.4%
  10. Idaho- 95.2%

North Carolina, New Hampshire, and Washington were all tied for the 10th spot while Idaho came in first for the second year in a row. All 10 states had spam levels well above the national average of 89.3%. On the other end of the spectrum, Puerto Rico came in as the least spammed U.S. state or territory for the second year in a row. It’s not known exactly why some states get more spam than others, but it may have to do with state spam laws and advertising regulations.

Some other facts the study revealed:

Most Spammed Industries: Engineering, Construction and Automotive.

Least Spammed: Admin, Public Sector, and Finance.

Most Spammed Countries: Luxembourg, China, Hong Kong, Germany, and The Netherlands.

As far a phishing goes, New Zealand takes the top spot while Japan was the least phished country. A new phishing scam was discovered – this one sent came in the form of emails offering a brand new PDF reader. Overall phishing levels increased with 1 in every 557.5 emails being a phishing attempt, an increase of .02% over June.

The report also found that the Storm botnet has come raging back and is pumping out pharmaceutical spam using URL shortening services. The masked URLs are easier to get by spam filters and blacklists. Storm was once the largest botnet in the world.

Virus levels decreased slightly with only 1 in ever 306 emails containing malware. That’s a drop of .04% from June.

Comments

King August 10, 2010

I don’t know why they do this survey, it has no point and provides no useful information. I lived in Colorado when I joined my ISP located in Seattle. I have since moved to the UK and then to the Texas. What state (or country) gets assigned my spam?

And this presumes spammers target locations. Spammers have no idea where I live and don’t care. They only care that I have an email address that (they think) they can reach. Actual direct marketing companies might keep up with location information and follow specific state laws, but they are responsible for a tiny fraction of total spam.

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