Majority of mail from Nigeria is spam

Published as a PhD, “Internet Bad Neighborhoods” by Brazilian academic Giovane César Moreira Moura, revealed the world’s top 20 ‘bad neighbourhoods’ (BadHoods) as a result of fraud detection studies.

Verified as network prefixes, internet service providers (ISPs) and countries, the top 20 Autonomous Systems (ASes) were shown to 50 per cent of all spamming IP addresses as tracked through 42,201 ASes contracted in the study.

“Internet BadHoods is a real phenomenon,” the thesis stated.  

Under the country category, India is identified as the worst among the 229 top countries listed for spam host density.

The most severe concentration of spam (7.53 per cent) comes from a single Indian internet service provider (ISP).

Following the 20 per cent of internet provider (IP) host spam from India, Vietnam and Brazil contributes 17 per cent each to the collective global count.

The 20 most spam-active countries’ junk and fraud mail amounts to 76.31 per cent of the world’s spam (IP) addresses.

Establishing the possible status of countries as sources of spam, “these findings advance the state of the art by showing that malicious hosts are concentrated not only in certain portions of the IP address space, but more clearly at higher aggregation levels, such as ISPs and countries,” the report said.  

Moura advises public and peer sources as a suggestion for protection of “individual targets”.

Furthermore, network administrators are to evaluate the Blacklist sources before using them.

Quoting Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time (1988), the author concludes: “It has certainly been true in the past that what we call intelligence and scientific discovery have conveyed a survival advantage. It is not so clear that this is still the case: Our scientific discoveries may well destroy us all.”

The PhD is available online as published by the University of Twente in Netherlands as part of the Centre for Telematics and Information Technology (CTIT) series.