Curious as to who you can thank for those glorious spam emails you receive? India, Italy, and United States, the top three countries when it comes to number of spam sent from July 2012 to September 2012.

According to the “Dirty Dozen” report by SophosLabs, a UK-based digital security firm, India sent a whopping 16.1% of the world’s spam during the quarter that ended in September; Italy sent 9.4%; and the United States sent 6.5%:

To be fair to the Indians, Sophos points out that the spam coming out of India does not necessarily mean that Indians or Indian companies are the ones sending the spam. The spam coming out of India, and other countries, could very well be a result of infected computers who are made part of spamming botnets without the knowledge of the end user. So while 16.1% of the world’s spam is coming from Indian computers and servers, that doesn’t necessarily mean that Indians sent them. The same goes for the other countries mentioned above.

It is interesting to note that China is only number ten on the above list. Yes, yes, I know — “only” number ten doesn’t sound like a great achievement. However, when you consider that China has the most number of people connected to the Internet than any other country (United States is second and India is third), being number ten when it comes to sending spam means something. What exactly does it mean? Well, it is hard to say for sure. It could be that Chinese computer users are more security-aware and properly protect their computers from botnet infections. On the other hand, a more cynical explanation could be that the Chinese are the ones that are behind the global botnets that send out the spam; as such, they like to target computers outside of China to infect. It could also be none of the above — I don’t know; I’ll let you decide.

If you are curious as to which continents spam the most, the list is topped by Asia (48.7%) followed by Europe (28.2%), South America (10.2%), North America (9.5%), and Africa (2.9%). It isn’t surprising that Asia is number one, seeing as Asia has more internet-connected users than any other continent. However, based on population/connected users, Europe and North America send send a disproportionate amount of spam — Europe too many while North American not enough.

[via Sophos]