Most of the world suffers from the spam problem. However, some countries do little to deter spammers from operating within their borders. These countries become safe havens for the spam operations that plague everyone else, including their own nationals.

Countries with the highest number of spammers operating within their networks are usually those with poor or non-existent spam laws.

The world’s worst Spam Haven countries today are:

1. United States
2. China
3. Russian Federation
4. United Kingdom
5. South Korea
6. India
7. Japan
8. Brazil
9. Germany
10. France

(taken from http://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/countries.lasso at 14 March 2009)

Spam continues to plague the Internet because a small number of large Internet Service Providers sell service knowingly to professional spammers for profit, or do nothing to prevent spammers operating from their networks.

Although all networks claim to be anti-spam, some network executives factor revenue made from hosting known spam gangs into corporate policy decisions to continue to sell services to spam operations. Others simply decide that closing the holes in their end-user broadband systems that allow spammers access would be too costly to their bottom lines.

The majority of the world’s service providers succeed in keeping spammers off their networks and work to maintain a positive anti-spam reputation, but their work is undermined daily by the few networks who, out of corporate greed or mismanagement, choose to be part of the problem. The world’s worst spam problem networks today are:

1. hostfresh.com
2. vsnlinternational.com
3. covad.com
4. cnuninet.com
5. relianceglobalcom.com
6. yahoo.com
7. gilat.net
8. tbroad.com
9. uatelecom.co.ua
10. tiscali.it

(taken from http://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/networks.lasso at 14 March 2009)

Up to 80% of spam targetted at Internet users in North America and Europe is generated by a hard-core group of around 200 known professional spam gangs whose names, aliases and operations are documented in Spamhaus’ Register Of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO) database.

This TOP 10 chart of ROKSO-listed spammers is based on those Spamhaus views as the highest threat, the worst of the career spammers causing the most damage on the Internet currently. Spamhaus flags these as a priority for Law Enforcement Agencies.

The world’s worst spammers and spam gangs this week are:

1. Canadian Pharmacy
   A long time running pharmacy spam operation. Uses botnet spam techniques to send tens-of-millions of spams per day. Probably uses many affiliates all over the world to spam but is probably based in Eastern Europe and hosts sites on botnets and on Chines
2. Leo Kuvayev / BadCow
   Russian/American spammer. Does “OEM CD” pirated software spam, copy-cat pharmaceuticals, porn spam, porn payment collection, etc. Spams using virus-created botnets and seems to be involved in virus distribution. Partnered with Vlad – aka “Mr. Green”
3. HerbalKing
   Massive affilitiate spam program for snakeoil Body Part Enhancement scams. Also does replica luxury goods, pharma and porn. Spams via botnets, bulletproof hosting offshore and even sometimes uses fast flux hosting.
4. Vincent Chan / yoric.net
   Vincent Chan and his Chinese partners have been sending spam for years. They mainly do pharmacy, and are able to send out huge amounts daily. The use a vast amount of compromised machines, for sending, hosting and proxy hijacking.
5. Alex Blood / Alexander Mosh / AlekseyB / Alex Polyakov
   So many Alex & Alexey spamming! Alex Blood tied to Pilot Holding & bbasafehosting.com long ago, then Alex Polyakov posted he owned them. Massive botnet and child-porn spam ring, also pharma, mortgage, and more. May work with Kuvayev and Yambo.
6. Nikhil Kumar Pragji / Dark-Mailer
   Through the Dark-Mailer Windows based proxy-botnet based spamware, this spammer is responsible for and behind a large portion of the world’s illegally send spam.
7. Peter Severa / Peter Levashov
   A spamming partner of Alan Ralsky and other spam gangs.
8. Yambo Financials
   Huge spamhaus tied into distribution and billing for child, animal, and incest-porn, pirated software, and pharmaceuticals. Run their own merchant services (credit-card “collection” sites) set up as a fake “bank.”
9. Ruslan Ibragimov / send-safe.com
   Stealth spamware creator. One of the larger criminal spamming operations around. Runs a CGI mailer on machines in Russia and uses hijacked open proxies and virus infected PCs to flood the world with spam.
10. Sistemnet
    Rogue Turkish network dedicated to hosting Eastern European botmasters and related cybercrime gangs.

(Taken from http://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/spammers.lasso at at 14 March 2009)

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