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Home > Plugged In > Archives > 2008 > July > 09 > Entry
Swiss spam & cheese
Think you get a lot of spam? Be glad you’re not in Switzerland.
The land of alps and edelweiss was the most spammed country int he world last month, according to the latest figures from email security and anti-spam company MessageLabs.
Nearly 85 percent of all e-mails in June in Switzerland were spam, according to the company. Canada was second on the world spam list, followed respectively by China, the United Kingdom and Germany. The United States was ninth on the list in June, with about 69 percent of all email traffic being spam.
Here are some other frightful facts from MessageLab’s June vulnerability report:
*One out of every 134 emails in June contained malware such as a virus or worm.
*One out of every 277 emails were part of a “phishing attack” designed to trick users into visiting Web sites and giving up sensitive personal or financial information.
*Among the most common (and most cheesy) spam emails included subject lines such as “What a stupid face you have!,” “Scandal rocks Obama as lurid sex video leaked!” and “Brad Pitt strips naked for Playgirl.”
Those spam emails led anyone who opened them to phishing sites linked to a search engine (Dogpile) and a porn site (PornTube), where further interaction could lead to user to inadvertently download a computer virus.
Perhaps the worse experience with spam wasn’t in Switzerland, however, but in the Marshall Islands. There, the nation’s only Internet service provider was taken off-line for about 18 hours when it was hit by a tidal wave of spam that quadrupled the ISP’s volume, according to MessageLabs.
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