Despite India having only 5.3 per cent of the world’s Internet users, 11.4 per cent of the world’s spam originates from here, more than any other country. This was revealed in a report released by SophosLabs, a threat analysis centre of IT security and data protection firm Sophos. Output of spam mails from India was 11.4 per cent of the global total in April-June. The percentage of spam relayed by the country has also been increasing every month. It increased by more than 2 per cent in this period when compared to the period between January and March this year. India contributed 9.3 per cent of the world’s spam in the first three months, according to the report. Asia, meanwhile, contributes about half of the total spam in the world.
For the previous quarter, the report noted that a majority of the spam came from computers that had been hijacked by hackers who had planted malicious codes. This was due to lack of adequate security in these computers. Between July and September last year, the country contributed 8.8 per cent of spam and was the third highest contributor in the world. Since then, India has risen to the top. We have little more than 12 crore Internet users and this number has also been steadily increasing. The report noted that first-time Internet users often didn’t take appropriate security measures resulting in mal-icious codes being planted on their computers.