China cleans up its spam problem
It's been a few years coming, but it looks like China may finally be getting a handle on its spam problem.
Once the largest source of the world's spam, China has been gradually fading off the list of the world's top spam-producers. Right now Cisco Systems' IronPort group ranks it at number 18 in terms of spam-producing countries. That's a big drop from two years ago, when it consistently ranked in the top five.
China is home to more than 420 million Internet users, according to the International Telecommunications Union, and many of them are connecting via hacked computers. Back in 2009, those hacked systems had been pumping out spam at a pretty good clip. In January of that year, China was ranked the number three spam-producing country in the world, according to data compiled by security vendor Sophos.