Monday, 18 March 2013
State-run BSNL topped the list of spam sources in a study which found that about 50% of all junk mail, while the most crime-ridden network was Spectranet in Nigeria as 62% of addresses controlled by that ISP were found to be sending out spasm with criminal intent.
Of the 42,201 ISPs studied about 50% of all junk mail, phising attacks and other malicious messages came from just 20 networks, Moura found. Many of these networks were concentrated in India, Vietnam and Brazil. Moura found networks involved in malicious activity also tended to specialise in one particular sort of malicious message or attack. The study showed that majority of phising attacks came from ISPs based in the United States. "By contrast, spammers tend to favour Asian ISPs. Indian ISP BSNL topped the list of spam sources in the study," BBC said.
Moura's study was carried out to help fine-tune computer security tools that scrutinise net addresses of email and other messages to help them work out if they are junk or legitimate. "Such tools could make better choices if they were armed with historical information about the traffic that emerge from particular networks," BBC said.
