Europe has become spam king?

At least according to the latest Symantec State of Spam (February). Nothing to be proud of. Maybe ENISA can take some initiative?

The February State of Spam Report highlights an interesting trend in the shift of spam moving from North America to EMEA. The percentage of spam originating from EMEA has surpassed that of North America, which represents a significant shift in where the bulk of the world’s spam is “supposedly” sent from.

This trend has been observed for the past three months with a culmination in January of approximately 44% of all spam email now originating from Europe, versus 35.1% from North America. But is this spam mail really originating in Europe? Although it appears that way the very nature of spam distribution makes it difficult to accurately pinpoint the true geographic origin the sender. Spammers often take advantage of tricks that allow them to mask their real location and bypass DNS block lists.

Why the increase in spam originating from Europe? One theory points to increased broadband usage. The past few years have seen a massive growth in broadband users in Europe. As of June 2007, Europe had six of the top ten countries for broadband users in the world. This massive growth in broadband users does appear to correlate to the sizeable increase in spam originating from Europe.

More information regarding this trend as well as highlights on other recent trends can be found in the February State of Spam Report.

Update (06/02/2008): ENISA pointed me to some of their previous initiatives concerning spam.