UAE is the spam capital of the Gulf

Tom Gara

• Last Updated: April 17. 2008 4:59AM UAE / April 17. 2008 12:59AM GMT

An artist's visual representation of a spam file. In the UAE the emails were sent by more than 50,000 computers that are part of so-called botnets. AP

More than 54 billion spam emails were sent from the UAE in the past 12 months, making the country the largest source of internet junk mail in the GCC.

The bulk of the emails were sent by more than 50,000 computers that are part of so-called botnets, Steve Chang, the founder and chairman of Trend Micro said yesterday.

Botnets are made up of a series of computers infected with a computer virus that allows them to be controlled remotely, often without the knowledge of their owners, effectively turning them into a supercomputer. They can be used for mass spamming or even to spread more viruses.

Security firms have struggled with the size and complexity of the problem, and have little information on those behind such networks or how they are being used.

A report by analysts at IBM estimated that botnets were earning operators at least US$2 million (Dh7.3m) a day through spam messaging and fraudulent transactions.

“This may be the first time that a top-10 supercomputer has been controlled not by a government or megacorporation, but by criminals,” said Peter Guttman, an independent security researcher. “The question remains, what are they going to do with it?”

Trend Micro, a California-based computer security firm, lists the UAE as the world’s 19th-largest source of infected PCs, despite having less than one per cent of the world’s computers.

“Awareness of security issues is lower here than in other parts of the world,” said Ian Cochrane, the marketing manager of Trend Micro for the UAE. “Use of antivirus and security software is lower, and plenty of people and companies still don’t take it seriously.”

The UAE is considered one of the world’s most connected nations, with almost 1.5 mobile phone lines for every person and high-speed internet available across the country.

Most computer viruses are distributed through attachments to emails and fraudulent websites.

While many viruses will attempt to destroy information or cripple the computer, the majority are now designed to remain invisible, causing no adverse effects but turning the computer into a “zombie” machine to be exploited.

The use of distributed computing power to tackle large, complex problems has been common for many years.

The SETI@home project pioneered the trend, allowing users to contribute to the search for extraterrestrial life by downloading a screensaver application that processed packets of data collected by radio telescopes across the world.

More recently, the notion of “cloud” computing, pioneered by Google, has changed the landscape of high-end computing. Rather than costly supercomputers, networks of thousands of simple personal computers working in tandem are now the most powerful information-crunching machines on the planet. Google’s “cloud” is made up of hundreds of thousands of personal computers in data centres across the world.

It processes more than 70,000 search queries every minute, while simultaneously scanning and archiving the entire internet every three days.

The most powerful of all the networks is the botnet, which is now settled comfortably in thousands of homes and offices across the country.

In 2007 a botnet was used to launch an attack on the core communications infrastructure of Estonia.

The small Baltic nation was forced to take sensitive government and military computer networks offline during the peak of the attack.

The assault was described by security analysts as the worst of its kind in history.

“I’ve been in the security business for more than 20 years and, trust me, there is nothing that anyone can do to defeat this thing,” said Mr Chang.


tgara@thenational.ae