Moldova the Center of Spam Operations?
I have been compiling stats on my site for some time and decided to do a little poking around with my spam filter to discern from where spam tends to originate. The statistics are very interesting no matter how you slice it.
Over the past year or so, this site has had 59,947 hits. I utilize a spam filter that exclusively looks at the content of the HTTP POST command to detect spam based on specific keywords and then permanently block the originating IP address. I also utilize reCAPTCHA on all forms to limit the amount of spambot attacks. Only three messages have made it past this security within the specified time frame. They were not included in this study.
Of the 59,947 hits, only 292 resulted in IP addresses being banned for violating the keyword list that I am utilizing. 68 of those originated from the Republic of Moldova from five different source IP addresses. Here is a complete breakdown by country.
| Country | Count | Sources |
| Republic of Moldova | 68 | 5 |
| Latvia | 62 | 9 |
| Russian Federation | 45 | 8 |
| Ukraine | 26 | 8 |
| United States | 22 | 16 |
| Netherlands | 21 | 4 |
| Germany | 16 | 5 |
| China | 9 | 7 |
| Luxembourg | 7 | 1 |
| Georgia | 7 | 1 |
| Israel | 3 | 1 |
| Sweden | 2 | 1 |
| Trinidad & Tobago | 1 | 1 |
| Republic of Korea | 1 | 1 |
| Italy | 1 | 1 |
| Islamic Republic of Iran | 1 | 1 |
If you break that down to the number of spam messages by source IP, the Republic of Moldova is still in first place with an average of 13.6 spam messages per offending source IP. That is nearly twice as many per IP address as any other violator. Here is a complete breakdown of the averages.
| Country | Per Source |
| Republic of Moldova | 13.60 |
| Luxembourg | 7.00 |
| Georgia | 7.00 |
| Latvia | 6.89 |
| Russian Federation | 5.63 |
| Netherlands | 5.25 |
| Ukraine | 3.25 |
| Germany | 3.20 |
| Israel | 3.00 |
| Sweden | 2.00 |
| United States | 1.38 |
| China | 1.29 |
| Trinidad & Tobago | 1.00 |
| Republic of Korea | 1.00 |
| Italy | 1.00 |
| Islamic Republic of Iran | 1.00 |
If you look at the per capita distribution of spam based on population, the Republic of Moldova finally drops off the top of the list - but barely. The following chart shows the rankings based on the number of spam messages per million people. Populations are based on the most recent data available from the CIA World Fact Book.
| Country | Per Capita |
| Latvia | 27.493 |
| Republic of Moldova | 18.871 |
| Luxembourg | 14.060 |
| Georgia | 1.556 |
| Netherlands | 1.270 |
| Trinidad & Tobago | 0.747 |
| Ukraine | 0.565 |
| Israel | 0.403 |
| Russian Federation | 0.317 |
| Sweden | 0.215 |
| Germany | 0.195 |
| United States | 0.072 |
| Republic of Korea | 0.021 |
| Italy | 0.017 |
| Islamic Republic of Iran | 0.014 |
| China | 0.007 |
The surprising thing to me was that China is nowhere near the top of any of these lists. The top countries tend to be eastern European. And trending does not show that level of industrial development has any apparent correlation to quantity of spam.
The overall winner for the most spam also goes to the IP address of 95.65.77.99 with 43 spam attempts. What country is the origin of this IP? You guessed it. The Republic of Moldova. However, the United States is the leader in number of offending IP addresses with 16. The Republic of Moldova is tied for sixth place with Germany.