Security and data protection solutions provider Sophos this morning announced the publication of its latest ‘Dirty Dozen’ report, covering the first quarter of this year.

Compared to the same period last year, India appears to have overtaken the United States as the top global contributor of junk messages, while spam originating from the United Kingdom has decreased by a massive 47 percent – meaning the UK is not even a member of the so-called ‘Dirty Dozen’ anymore.

For the record: Sophos competitors Kaspersky and Trend Micro had both already indicated that India was the world’s biggest source of spam in the past, and Cisco Systems even ranked India at the top in its 2011 security report (PDF).

According to Sophos, there’s a one in ten chance that spam was relayed from an Indian computer. The country obviously has a vast amount of Internet users, which is part of the reason India is ranked on top of the list for spam-relaying countries. Other reasons are lax legislation and not enough awareness regarding the security of networks and machines among both end users and ISPs.

After all, most spam messages are sent from home computers that have been compromised by malicious hackers and turned into a ‘botnet’.

In the first quarter of 2011, the UK ranked sixth on the list of spam sources, contributing roughly 3.2 percent of global junk emails. Since then, it has fallen off the Dirty Dozen entirely and, in terms of sheer numbers, UK spam has decreased by nearly 50 percent, according to Sophos.

The security software company also has some great news to share: overall throughput of global email spam messages has seemingly decreased since the first quarter of 2011. Hurray! Except …

Don’t break out the champagne just yet, because it means spammers are merely finding new ways to spread junk messages (on social networks and whatnot).

Also, the amount of messages that spread malware or represent more targeted attempts to ‘phish’ usernames, passwords and personal information, is increasing.

Overall, Google does a great job at separating the email wheat from the email chaff.

In fact, one of the reasons I’m a rabid Gmail fan is its ability to kick junk email straight to the spam folder where it belongs so I don’t have to waste time doing that. I still check the folder regularly, just to make sure I don’t miss any important messages, but it’s rare for me to find any emails from real people in there.

Which reminds me I still need to respond to that one guy who emailed me the other day to let me know I was chosen to help him access multi-million dollar funds currently trapped in Nigeria, and could get disgustingly rich in the process.

Anyway, sometimes it’s helpful to know why certain messages were sent to the spam folder, and Google this morning announced that it will henceforth start showing a short explanation at the top of each message in the spam folder.

Thus, users can find out why it wound up there in the first place, and learn about any potentially harmful content within the message, Google says.

Needless to say, it will also be useful information for email marketers.

Google+ has been making incremental changes to the flow of its social service that makes using it easier and less annoying. One of the unfortunate side effects of posting things publicly is that anyone can comment on it, including spammers.

The service lets you report these spammers but until now has left the original spammy comment in space, but just grayed it out to let you know that Google+ thinks it’s spam. It was helpful, but still made a thread of comments super noisy if it became popular across the platform.

The Google+ team announced a tweak today that sweeps spam further under the carpet, pulling the comments out of the thread of ones that you’d actually want to read. The changes will be rolling out over the next few days and here’s a bit more detail:

- Instead of showing moderated comments inline, we’ll now group and hide them behind a small indicator just beneath the comment count
- If you feel like taking a look, then you can. Otherwise you never have to see these comments in your stream.

Here’s what the new neatly grouped together spam comments will look like:

As the team points out, you don’t ever have to interact with these comments unless you’re worried that the service accidentally marked something as spam. That used to be the case with Gmail until we all slowly began to trust the accuracy of its spam detection tool. I imagine that the same thing will happen with Google+ over time.

It’s nice to see changes like this that will encourage people to share more things publicly without worrying about a bunch of junk taking all of their time to wade through.

Twitter is a great platform to get people stoked about anything, if done right. You can promote potato chips like @popchips does, and it could turn into a huge following for your brand and have fun doing it.

Or, you can do it completely wrong and annoy the hell out of people by spamming them on Twitter. Toyota opted for the second choice, spam people.

In what is probably the worst Twitter promotion I’ve seen on the platform since the company launched in 2006, Toyota has created a slew of accounts and is spamming people about what it is calling the “Camry Effect a Friend’ Giveaway!”. The worst part is that they’re all verified accounts, so while Twitter isn’t involved in the promotion, someone at the company definitely knows about it.

Surely a company as big as Toyota did some research first, targeting people who would really be jazzed about this promotion right? Nope. It appears as if all of these accounts are spitting out the same junk to people who use any hashtags or phrases having to do with the Super Bowl. Tweets with hashtags like #giants and #patriots are causing these Camry accounts to reply to you in an effort to get you to sign up to win a car for your friend or something:

The accounts I’ve seen doing this are @CamryEffect, @CamryEffect1, @CamryEffect2, @CamryEffect3, @CamryEffect4, and @CamryEffect5. There are probably more, so you get the picture.

Like I mentioned, the worst part about all of this is that these accounts have all been blessed by Twitter as being “verified”. I’m not sure what the company was thinking when they verified a grip of accounts with similar names. It just screams “spam”.

Take a look at this “promotion” from one of Toyota’s accounts:

All this poor girl did was mention her favorite team, the Patriots. I’ve seen some chitter chatter from friends on the service and they’re all reporting the accounts for spam. So far it hasn’t worked, and hopefully it’s not because these accounts are verified. Twitter has enough to worry about during the Super Bowl weekend, like staying online, and this certainly isn’t a good way to start.

What do you think about Toyota’s promotion? Tell us in the comments!

UPDATE: It appears as if the Twitter accounts owned by Toyota that we mentioned above have all been switched over to “private”, and we received this comment from Toyota:

We apologize to anyone in the Twitterverse who received an unwanted @reply over the past few days. We were excited to share the message of our Camry Effect campaign in a new way and it was never our intention to displease anyone.
We’ve certainly learned from this experience and have suspended the accounts effective immediately to avoid any additional issues.
Kimberley Gardiner, National Digital Marketing & Social Media Manager, Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A. Inc.

If you’re an avid user of Google+, you know that one of the things that makes your experience crappy is the spam you get. You know what I’m talking about. You post an animated GIF of a dog walking on a rainbow and all of a sudden you get a comment from someone you don’t know with a link to a site that’s probably up to no good.

It’s a similar problem on blogs, and Google does have a system for deleting comments and blocking users, but it’s kind of clunky. Sure, you could share with only your circles and that would keep the spammers from commenting, but that makes you feel trapped.

No need to feel trapped anymore, thanks to a new Google Chrome extension called “Nuke Comments on Google+“, which not only delete the offending comment, but automatically blocks the user in just one click.

Once you install the extension for Chrome, you’ll find a new button sitting next to comments that say “Nuke”. Don’t click it on accident though!

Once you’ve “nuked” a comment, you’ll be notified that it is complete. After that, you don’t have to think about that user again because they’re automatically blocked:

The only thing that this extension is missing is the “report” feature. While deleting a comment and blocking someone does the trick, it doesn’t tell Google who to look out for as far as spamming. However, clicking that nuke button sure does make you feel like you have control of your stream again.

➤ Nuke Comments on Google+“

In what was first thought to be a spam attack against subscribers of the New York Times, it turns out that it was just an oopsie by the newspaper.

Here’s what the email said:

Dear Home Delivery Subscriber,

Our records indicate that you recently requested to cancel your home delivery subscription. Please keep in mind when your delivery service ends, you will no longer have unlimited access to NYTimes.com and our NYTimes apps.

We do hope you’ll reconsider.

As a valued Times reader we invite you to continue your current subscription at an exclusive rate of 50% off for 16 weeks. This is a limited-time offer and will no longer be valid once your current subscription ends.*

Continue your subscription and you’ll keep your free, unlimited digital access, a benefit available only for our home delivery subscribers. You’ll receive unlimited access to NYTimes.com on any device, full access to our smartphone and iPad® apps, plus you can now share your unlimited access with a family member.†

To continue your subscription call 1-877-698-0025 and mention code 38H9H (Monday–Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m.; Saturday, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. E.D.T.).

It was a legitimate email though, only meant to go to 300 subscribers. Not 8 million people who gave the company their email address at one point or another. That’s a massive screwup. The internet buzzed for hours, speculating on who would carry out such an evil attack. The company itself first called it spam which fueled everyone’s curious minds.

If you received an email today about canceling your NYT subscription, ignore it. It’s not from us.

— The New York Times (@nytimes) December 28, 2011

A NYT reporter however, told us that it wasn’t spam after all:

UPDATE on NYT email: “The email was sent by the NYT,” a spokeswoman said. Should’ve gone to appx 300 people & went to over 8 mil. Story TK

— Amy Chozick (@amychozick) December 28, 2011

Now the flub is causing more work and confusion for tech bloggers, causing everyone to have to update their posts.

The company has published an official apology from its spokeswoman, Eileen Murphy:

We regret that the error was made, but no one’s security has been compromised

That leaves the New York Times with the age-old question and dilemma of “Do we now send emails to everyone with an apology and explanation?”. Probably not, since it’s a surefire way to get dropped into spam bins all over the web.

And just as I was about to publish this post, the New York Times answered that age-old question with:

You may have received an e-mail today from The New York Times with the subject line “Important information regarding your subscription.”

This e-mail was sent by us in error. Please disregard the message. We apologize for any confusion this may have caused.

Sincerely,

The New York Times

Twitter spam is something you may have noticed since you started using the service, or something you may have noticed less of lately, since the company may have removed over 100,000 spam accounts.

Twitter spam looks like a regular old tweet, mostly a reply to one of yours, especially if you mention the word “iPhone” or “iPad”.

Developer Andre Torrez has decided to fight back with LaterSpam.org.

LaterSpam lets you log into Twitter, and you are shown your last replies. If one looks like spam, just mark it as such. LaterSpam also tracks how many spam tweets you’ve reported. The app uses the Twitter API to report the spam tweet officially, just like you would have to do by hand using a standalone Twitter app. On your dashboard, you’re shown the accounts that have been suspended, to confirm that your suspicions were correct or not.

On his blog, Torrez says:

In my experience there isn’t much of a spam problem on Twitter. Yes, it’s annoying to mention something about your iPad and have a spam bot or two tell you how you can get a free one just by “clicking this URL,” but I feel like that happens once or twice a month at most.

I normally just mark the thing as spam and move on. But the last time it happened I clicked over to see the account’s timeline and saw they had been at it for quite some time. Even tweeting innocuous tweets in between the mention spam which I guessed was to throw off Twitter’s own spam algorithms.

In a way, Andre Torrez has made reporting spam on Twitter fun. Will you join the crusade to help end Twitter spam?