Nigeria has world's must crime-ridden ISP

The world’s most crime-riddled Internet service provider is SpectraNet in Nigeria, new research has found. It says that 63% of site addresses hosted on SpectraNet’s servers were found to be sending spam—the highest proportion among 42,201 ISPs studied by Giovane Cesar Moreira Moura, researcher at the Centre for Telematics and Information Technology in the Netherlands.

Crime tended to be concentrated in small areas. A single Indian ISP was found to be uniquely responsible for 7% of the spamming website addresses in the world. Twenty of 42,201 ISPs monitored for Mr. Moreira Moura’s thesis created almost half of the world’s spam.

Mr. Moreira Moura suggests that online crime is distributed in a similar way to the real world with higher rates concentrated in particular neighborhoods. The neighborhood model has implications for cyber-security:

The idea behind the ‘Internet Bad Neighborhood’ concept is that the probability of a host in behaving badly increases if its neighboring hosts (i.e., hosts within the same subnetwork) also behave badly. This idea, in turn, can be exploited to improve current Internet security solutions, since it provides an indirect approach to predict new sources of attacks (neighboring hosts of malicious ones).

We contacted SpectraNet for comment but they had not responded by the time of publication.

WSJ

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