Spammers Stalk Smaller States, Businesses

Spammers have evolved over time to become more discerning in both the content of their messages and the targets of their illicit operation.

As eSecurity Planet reports, the latest study from Symantec found that people living and working in less populous states such as Idaho and Alabama receive the highest percentage of spam in their email while large states such as California and New York are at the middle or back of the back.

Meanwhile, Montana, Louisiana and Puerto Rico were the least targeted U.S. states and territories last year.

By industry, the report found that spammers zeroed in on companies in the engineering, automotive and construction sectors with the most frequency while the least-spammed verticals included finance, administration and the public sector.

Internet users in Idaho, Alabama and South Carolina receive a higher percentage of spam messages in their inboxes than residents in other U.S. states, according to the latest report from security software vendor Symantec’s Message Labs Intelligence group.

The report also found that e-mail accounts at small and midsized businesses around the country are targeted with more spam than large enterprise customers, a trend that figures to continue as SMBs often lack the IT resources to invest in top-tier security applications installed by their larger brethren.

Idaho, the potato capital of the universe, was a runaway leader in the spam to non-spam e-mail ratio for the second year in a row, checking in at 95.2 percent. Alabama checked in at 94.4 percent, followed by South Carolina (93.6 percent), Indiana (92.7 percent) and Tennessee (92.1 percent).

Read the full story at eSecurity Planet:


Small Businesses, Southern States Targeted by Spammers