India has been given the dubious honour of being named the top source of spam in the world in a report from Internet security firm Kaspersky.

According to Kaspersky, during the third quarter of 2011, an average of 79.8% of global email traffic was spam. Of that, 14.8% originated in India, with Indonesia and Brazil taking the second and third spots with 10.6% and 9.7% respectively.

As AFP reports, it appears that crackdowns on sending junk email in other countries have sent spammers to India, where laws on the practice are said to be lax. The size of the Indian Internet userbase is possibly a factor too – behind China and the USA it has the third largest number of Internet users in the world.

Kaspersky told AFP that lack of awareness of technical issues in India means that it’s easy for cyber-criminals to build ‘botnets’ of computers to carry out spam attacks without their users being aware.

The ball’s now in the Indian government’s court to provide laws that cure the country’s apparent spam epidemic.