Cybercrime top countries
Date: July 15, 2007Source: Forbes.com
Cybercrime, like every digital industry, is outsourcing. Though the U.S. still produces more malware, spam and viruses than any country in the world, illicit IT jobs are increasingly scattered across an anarchic and international Internet, where labor is cheap, legitimate IT jobs are scarce and scammers are insulated from the laws that protect their victims by thousands of miles. As Thomas Friedman might say, the criminal underworld is flat.
According to a Symantec (nasdaq: SYMC - news - people ) report at the end of 2006, Beijing is now home to the world's largest collection of malware-infected computers, nearly 5% of the world's total. Research by the security company Sophos in April showed that China has overtaken the U.S. in hosting Web pages that secretly install malicious programs on computers to steal private information or send spam e-mails. And another report from Sophos earlier that month showed that Europe produces more spam than any other continent; one Polish Internet service provider alone produces fully 5% of the world's spam.
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