The 2007 PandaLabs annual report indicates that nearly half a million computers are infected with bots daily, which means that around 11 percent of equipment worldwide is inserted in botnets.
According to Panda, the total volume of infected machines is responsible for sending 85 percent of the spam in circulation.
That said, the security company found that, last year, more than 50 percent of emails received by home users were junk mail. The same happened in business environments, where the percentage of electronic waste received was between 80 and 95 percent.
Rui Lopes, director of the Panda Security Consulting department, explains in a statement that, in order to have a sense of the scale of the problem «about 2 thousand terabytes of free disk space to store the total volume of spam sent in just one day «.
Regarding the themes used to spread these unwanted messages, sexual health was the most popular topic. These emails accounted for 54 percent of all the spam detected. Between April and September, pharmaceutical topics topped the list, with 45 percent of unsolicited messages sent in the second quarter and 30 percent in the third quarter.
Regarding the origin of junk mail, Russia was the leader of the Panda table, since 59.72 percent of all spam detected was from that country. On the other hand, 23.08 percent of messages were sent from the United States, 6.12 percent from Turkey, 4.77 percent from Germany and 3.16 percent from the United Kingdom.
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