Spamalot
Plumber of the internet, Cisco, reckons the US is no longer the main pipe clogger when it comes to Spam, with Brazil taking the trophy in 2009.
According to a Cisco security report, pompously entitled "Cisco's State of the Internet 2009", not only is spam going Brazilian, it's also muscling in on your social networks, with an increasing number of phishing attacks coming from the likes of Facebook and Twitter.
The US, however, seems to be doing a decent job at canning the spam, with only a measly 6.6 trillion messages pushing you to buy enhancement pills or collect your lottery winnings originating there, compared with some 8.3 trillion messages in 2008, a 20.3 per cent decline.
Brazil, on the other hand saw its spam skyrocket by 193 per cent from 2008, with a whopping 7.7 trillion messages in 2009, up from 2.7 trillion.
Cisco said it was up to service providers to better educate consumers and to flog them more security software - which would likely manifest itself in the form of irritating pop-ups at rather inopportune moments.
Of course, making individual computers safe is in the interest of the common good, as infected PCs can easily be roped in to act as zombie spam-sending botnet components, which makes the whole spam problem that much worse.
Not wanting to be unfriended, Cisco also stopped short of blaming social networking sites for increased spam, but did say the sites needed to help users choose stronger passwords and protect themselves against social engineering ploys.
In other words, if you're another one of those smart alecs whose password is "password", you might want to reconsider.
