India Ranked Third on the List of Spam Spewing Nation in the World

India ranked third on list of countries which distribute spam all over the world, after US and China, as per the new report of SophosLabs. SophosLabs is the Sophos’s global network of threat analysis centres.

In the study, US was single highest ranking country, but Asia ranked at number 1 position in the list of the continents with 36.6 percent of overall spam of the world. US sent 18.3 percent of the junk emails overall in the world. In last few months of 2012, India topped the spam spewing nations’ list, but eventually fell back to the third position. Second position was held by China.

In the study, the spam sent from December 2012 to February 2013 was tracked. China and India took second and third positions respectively with 8.2 percent and 4.2 percent of the spam of the world.

Other countries which ranked high included South Korea, France, Italy and Peru. Peru was ranked at fourth position with 4.0 percent of the spam. With 3.4 percent each, France, South Korea and Italy ranked fifth. Russia and Taiwan shared eighth position with 2.9 percent. At tenth, eleventh and twelfth position were Spain (2.8 percent), Germany (2.7 percent) and Iran (2.6 percent).

In order to prevent spamming, the PC users can keep the anti-virus software updated and regularly run the malware checks. Apart from this, updating passwords regularly can also help.

First Facebook, then Apple and now Microsoft's computers hacked

Microsoft said that a small number of its computers, including some in its Mac software business unit, were infected with malware, but there was no evidence of customer data being affected and it is continuing its investigation.

The world's largest software company said the security intrusion was "similar" to recent ones reported by Apple and Facebook.

The incident, reported on one of the company's public blogs happened "recently", but Microsoft said it chose not to make any statement publicly while it gathered information about the attack.

"This type of cyberattack is no surprise to Microsoft and other companies that must grapple with determined and persistent adversaries," said Matt Thomlinson, general manager of Trustworthy Computing Security at Microsoft, in the company's blog post.

Over the past week or so, both Apple and Facebook said computers used by employees were attacked after visiting a software developer website infected with malicious software.

The attacks come at a time of broader concern about computer security.

Newspaper websites, including those of The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, have been infiltrated recently. Earlier this month US President Barack Obama issued an executive order seeking better protection of the country's critical infrastructure from cyber attacks.

Facebook says it was hacked

Facebook said it was the target of hackers but no user information was compromised during the attack.

The social media giant said on Friday on its security blog that the company discovered in January that its system had been targeted in a sophisticated attack. The attack occurred when a handful of the company’s employees visited a developer’s compromised website, which led to malware being installed on their laptops.

Facebook said it has found no evidence that user data was compromised.

The company has fixed the infected machines, and an investigation is under way. Facebook also said it was not the only company targeted in the attacks but was one of the first to discover it.