US spam levels up, state of Illinois is the worst offender

From MessageLabs:

Spam levels for the US in June have reached 86% compared to spam levels at 81.5% in the rest of the world. Breaking this information down further, MessageLabs reports that some US states are more affected than others. Varying socioeconomic factors are thought to affect the spam rates in certain states and the higher levels of spam can be attributed to the fact that consumers, employees and businesses don’t place as high a priority on IT security as other states do. In addition, citizens of these states may be more willing to share personal information via the internet, increasing their likelihood of being spammed.

The top 10 most spammed US states are:

1. Illinois
2. South Dakota
3. Oregon
4. New Hampshire
5. Wisconsin
6. North Carolina
7. Indiana
8. Texas
9. Pennsylvania
10. Alabama

“The varying spam levels across states can be attributed to different socioeconomic factors and levels of security awareness in each state,” said Matt Sergeant, Senior Anti-Spam Technologist, MessageLabs. “The states that are experiencing higher spam levels may not place as high a priority on IT security overall or employees and businesses may be more willing to share their personal contact information in public domains. When email addresses are openly available, spammers take advantage of it and inundate those inboxes with massive amounts of spam.”

MessageLabs scans three billion email connections per day and in June 2008, the global ratio of spam in email traffic from new and previously unknown bad sources was 81.5%. The lowest percentage of spam going to a single state was 78.5 percent. The average spam level for the entire US reached 86 percent in June.

“Not only are spam levels increasing, we are also seeing several new and different types of spam,” Sergeant said. “Spam has become mailed out in smaller, more targeted batches and spammers are using varying approaches from leveraging celebrity names and current events to grab attention to exploiting mainstream hosted services like Microsoft Skydrive and Google Docs to evade spam filters. Spammers are relentless in their tactics for exploiting computer users.”

I'm not sure I agree with the conclusions that were made, such as "consumers, employees and businesses don’t place as high a priority on IT security as other states do".  I do a lot of work in the Midwest, where 2 of the top 5 and 3 of the top 7 states are, and I'm not sure I feel this is an accurate assumption.  An interesting study though.

I was pretty shocked that the state I live in, Illinois, is so high in the list.  I'm also a little baffled that the states with higher populations, and what I would consider more tech savvy populations, say for instance New York, California, and Seattle aren't higher in the list.

It would be interesting if some numbers could be generated around the reasons for this, similar to the Verizon Data Breach report, but I'm not sure if that would be possible.

-Nate