In 2017, India had the largest bot army in the world. But these weren’t of the apocalyptic kind, they’re spam bots – more than 800 thousand of which generate 14.5 percent of the world’s spam. According to a Cisco Cyber Security Report, 85 percent of emails sent in India are spam, the highest ratio in the world.
Bots don’t necessarily source from the host country. They are systems infected with viruses that send out bulk mails – often without their owners knowing (the symptoms can be a slower PC, or increased internet usage). They can get installed by clicking on a malicious link, or installing infected software.
Indian spammers are not often highlighted (as opposed to their Nigerian counterparts) but they’ve been in practice since the late 1990s. And in certain Usenet forums and image-boards, Indian ISP ranges are banned altogether.
A PhD thesis on ‘Internet Bad Neighborhoods‘ mentions India prominently – as source of the largest absolute number of spamming IP addresses. The study claims a single ISP, belonging to a BSNL user, “concentrated 7.39% of all the spamming addresses observed for the entire world in our datasets.” As an automated system provider, BSNL was the largest source of spammy IP addresses – with a Pakistani state-owned network next in the list. There’s not much BSNL can do about it, however. The problem is that India lacks anti-spam legislation.
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