A recently published report by Sophos confirms that the United States has retained the ignoble title of spam king.

China was rated the second worst offender, while Russia maintained its third place position. A number of other countries, including Canada, Japan and France, dropped off the security firm's list of spam reprobates.

"Although there's no denying that some countries have significantly reduced their contribution to the spam epidemic over the past five years, the United States still holds the crown," explained Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos. "Though its spam contribution has significantly decreased – falling from almost half of all spam relayed at the end of 2004, to 21.3 per cent by the end of 2007, and now resting at 19.8 per cent – this shows there's certainly no quick fix."

Cluley told the IT Examiner that spam had evolved from a mere nuisance to a dangerous phenomenon.

"Spam not only promotes medications that may damage your health and impact your wallet, it also puts your computer at risk as we see more and more malware attacks containing a spam component. Be a good internet citizen and make sure that you are not adding to the problem by properly defending your computer. If you don't protect your PC, you might be risking infection from a hacker, who will use your computer's resources to plague others with unwanted spam," added Cluley.

The senior technology consultant also noted that criminal elements have shown an increased interest in social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

"Spammers really took to using sites like Facebook and Twitter as a vehicle for their spam antics during the last three months of 2008. Cyber criminals have cottoned onto the fact that social networking users can be more easily fooled into clicking on a link that appears to have come from a trusted Facebook friend, than if it arrived as an unsolicited email in their inbox," said Cluey. X