The following shows the top ten countries based on spam emitted per capita:
1. The Pitcairn Islands
2. Niue
3. Tokelau
4. Anguilla
5. The Faroe Islands
6. Monaco
7. North Korea
8. Bermuda
9. The Falkland Islands
10. Andorra
When the top three spam-relaying countries are considered in terms of population, the United States is in 64th position, Russia in 45th, and China plummets to 132nd.
"Between October-December 2007, the US relayed far more spam than any other country due to the sheer number of computers in the country that had been taken over by remote hackers," said Carole Theriault, senior security consultant at Sophos. "But when measuring spam emitted per capita, the results are very different. Most of the countries in this chart have very small populations compared to the usual offenders, but their totals are sky high when it comes to spam emitted on a per-person basis. Just because your PC is located on a remote island in the South Pacific doesn't mean it's not contributing to the global spam problem. All computer users, wherever they are in the world, need to wake up to the threats and ensure their PCs are properly protected."
The changing positions of other top spam-relaying countries when looking at them from a spam-per-person perspective are as follows:
- United Kingdom drops from 9th to 50th
- Canada drops from 26th to 89th
- Japan drops from 32nd to 136th
- Australia drops from 33rd to 85th
