Last November,Sophos IT security firm released a data protection report mentioning that Indonesia is included in the world’s top 10 spammers. Now, Russian antivirus maker, Kaspersky, has released a supporting discovery. Indonesia is ranked number two after India as the world’s biggest spammers. The data was collected from all spam emails sent until September 2011.
It is estimated that 10.6% of junk mail originated from Indonesia. India and Brazil also entered into the top three of this list with 14.8% and 9.7% respectively. Indonesia entered Sophos’ list in the 8th position.
As quoted by AFP,Mr Darya Gudkova, a spam analyst at Kaspersky, said that the statistics reflected a growing trend that more and more spam is sent from Asia and Latin America. A similar trend is also observed by Sophos. According to Sophos’ list, South Korea is the number one email spammer. It seems that spam delivery rate in India and Indonesia is due to the lack of effective law enforcement relating to Internet security.
In Indonesia, although the “Information and Electronic Transaction Law” (Act No. 11 Year 2008/UU ITE) doesn’t explicitly express articles relating to spam or junk-mail, this kind of action should be forbidden. This is also set in the “Chapter VII, Article 27-34”. Violations of these articles could lead to an imprisonment or fines.
However, the fact is until now we haven’t heard anyone in Indonesia being arrested for sending spam emails or statements from interested parties saying that this may be a significant problem for the Internet community in Indonesia. I’m sure that you certainly know what has been disputed by our government in 2011.
Of course the dubious honors isn’t something to be proud about, especially since Indonesians very much like to declare themselves as the most prolific nation in social media. However, as mentioned by Internet specialist Mr Vijay Mukhi, without any serious effort from government and law enforcement, it would be very difficult to erase the email spam sender’s network.
Will the government still struggle with normative issues and forget about the more important ones such as Internet crime in 2012? Until now we are still pessimistic until the government and its Cybercrime team could manage a significant effort to reduce this problem.
