The countries of hackers originating malware-laced spam runs have been exposed by new research, which confirms they are often located thousands of miles away from the compromised systems they use to send out junk mail.
A third of targeted malware attacks sent so far in March came from the United States (36.6 per cent), based on mail server location. However, after the sender's actual location is analysed, more targeted attacks actually began in China (28.2 per cent) and Romania (21.1 per cent) than the US (13.8 percent), according to the March 2010 edition of the monthly MessageLabs security report.

Paul Wood, MessageLabs intelligence senior analyst, explained the discrepancy:

The link for this article located at The Register UK is no longer available.