The amount of spam pumping out of China dropped precipitously in the first three months of 2007, security vendor Sophos reported Wednesday. A year ago, computers in China were sending out 21.1 percent of all spam messages, but that number has steadily dropped over the past year, totalling just 7.5 percent in the most recent quarter, Sophos said. During the first seven days of 2007, for example, China accounted for only 1.7 percent of spam messages, an unusually precipitous drop, said Carole Theriault, a senior security consultant with Sophos. "We saw a really significant drop in China at the beginning of this term," she said. "It"s almost as if some ISPs were taken offline."
The cutoff was probably caused by two major December 26 earthquakes off the coast of Taiwan, which damaged underwater data cables and disrupted Internet access in Asia, Theriault said. But some of the credit also goes to a country-wide spam crackdown, she added. "China has been working to reduce its spam for some time now, and I think there is evidence that they have been successful." The United States" anti-spam efforts have yielded more modest results in 2006. Though the United States was once the source of nearly half the world"s spam, last year it totalled 23.2 percent. In this most recent quarter the number was 19.8 percent, a much more modest drop than seen in China, Theriault said.