A recent report from Messagelabs shows that spammers are now utilizing automated translation services to translate their messages into other languages, allowing for them to target more countries with the same content with little extra effort on their part.
Free, online translation services have become a favorite of 419-type advance-fee fraudsters. Only recently though, have general spam senders also adopted these tactics as their own. Some countries who have enjoyed better email security before now are seeing a dramatic rise in the level of spam due to the translation of messages into their native tongue.
Spam levels in Germany and The Netherlands have risen by 13% since May of this year, with spam now representing over 95% of all email traffic globally. According to the report, “…in Germany 46.5% of all spam is in German and 2.5% in French. In The Netherlands, 25% of spam is in the Dutch language while in France, 53% is in French and 4% in German. In Japan, 62.3% of the spam is found to be in Oriental non-English languages and in China, this number is 54.7%.”
Despite the influx of non-English spam, however, the report also shows that around the world most spam is still targeting the English language. In July only 1 in every 20 spam messages was in a non-English language.
