Two minutes of spam with Google Earth

Filed Under: Spam, Video

Next week we'll be publishing our regular report into the top "dirty dozen" nations - in other words, those countries where the most compromised machines are found relaying spam to the rest of us.

It's often a surprise to people outside the industry to learn that most of the time spammers don't actually use their own computers to send their unwanted marketing messages - instead they use hacked PCs belonging to innocent people, taking remote control of them and forcing them en masse to pump out junk emails.

In SophosLabs we track spam in a number of ways. In this short video my colleagues Carole Theriault and Mark Harris demonstrate how we plot the PCs sending the spam using Google Earth.

(Enjoy this video? You can check out more on the SophosLabs YouTube channel and subscribe if you like)

And don't forget to look out for our latest spam report next week.

About the author

Graham Cluley is senior technology consultant at Sophos. The readers of Computer Weekly voted him security blogger of the year in 2009 and 2010, and he pipped Stephen Fry to the title of "Twitter user of the year" too. Which was nice. He was also named "Best Security Blogger" by the readers of SC Magazine in 2011. You can subscribe to Graham's updates on Facebook, follow him on Twitter and circle him on Google Plus for regular updates.