Belarus, familiar to most Americans as an answer they missed on every geography test they ever took, now has a rather dubious claim to fame. The Register reports that, according to a web security firm, the Eastern European nation is now the world’s number-one producer of spam.
Guess America is really losing our edge, guys.
The Register says that on April 13, the volume of spam messages originating in Belarus spiked from 3.1 million per day to 12.3 million. Belarus now produces 16.3 percent of spam, compared to 15.1 percent from the U.S. (Of course, we were probably only in the lead because Russian authorities have cracked down.)
But they’re not exactly producing small-batch, hand-crafted, artisanal spam. According to one analyst, it’s all dreadfully mass-market:
“Most of the messages just simply contained a link and a few words. Many of the links did not lead to active webpages, with most giving 500 or 404 server errors.”
“The links that did work lead to pharmacy websites trying to sell drugs to visitors. There was a very small amount of the messages that also lead to websites hosting malware,” he added.
What’s the world come to, when spammers barely bother throwing in some malware?
