Where does the world's spam come from?

The United States is the top source of the majority of the spam emails filling up your inbox.

Security software business Kaspersky compiled a 2015 report on spam that found more than 55% of all emails received across the world are spam.

The United States came out top, with more than 15% of global spam originating there.

Russia, Vietnam and China each produced around 6% – less than half of the amount coming from the US.

The overall volume of spam emails has reduced by almost 12 percentage points since 2014, and Kaspersky is expecting this decline to continue.

Germany is the country most often targeted by malicious emails, with almost 20% of global spam received in German inboxes. The UK and the US received around 10% of global malicious spam between them.

Russia has seen the biggest growth, moving from eight to third place. In 2014 Russia received 3.24% of malicious spam. This figure grew to more than 6% in 2015.

The 2016 Olympic Games in Brazil was a popular spam topic, according to Kaspersky: “Already in 2015 fraudulent notifications of lottery wins dedicated to this popular sporting event were being registered.”

Despite the decline in spam emails, Kaspersky is warning that the number of malicious and fraudulent messages will increase, with mobile phones expected to become “yet another weapon in the cybercriminals’ arsenal”.

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