India is in most spam affected nations

Bangalore: The Cisco annual security report suggests that India is the third most affected country in the world for spam mail attacks. The country has seen a 130 percent increase in spam mail attacks as compared to last year, reports Economic Times.

Most of the spam mails originate in the U.S. The volume of spam mails in India between January and December 2009 was close to a whooping 3.6 trillion. In 2008, there were 1.6 trillion spam mails.

According to Economic Times, these mails originated from pharmaceutical companies, banks, educational institutions and service providers. According to the Cisco report,there has been a 30 to 40 percent rise in spam mails in 2009 alone and these have been listed as the single most threat to business, potent enough for security concerns.

As per the report, the world's emerging economies are responsible for output of 55 percent of the world's total global spam. Nearly 90 percent of the spam mails, states the report, are categorized as 'easy spams' - the regular promotional advertisements that flood inboxes. 'Hard spams', on the other hand, have a malware embedded in them. They force the receiver to click a link and the Trojan virus is operated. Hard spams are generally present in pharmaceutical spam mails.

Top-producing examples include 'spamvertised' sales of pharmaceutical products, spamvertised or 'spamdexed' advertisements for pirated software and scareware. The year 2009 saw massive profits generated by scareware spyware and weight-loss remedy scams.However , most of the world's developing economies, including Brazil,India,and Vietnam,show rising spam levels between January and December 2009.