Nearly half of junk e-mails contain viruses
(Agencies)
Updated: 2004-04-17 09:38

Forty-seven percent of all the junk e-mail received by China's Internet surfers contain viruses, according to a survey conducted by Kingsoft, one of the country's leading software companies.

Of all the 83,641 Internet users that answered the Kingsoft anti-spam questionnaire, 54 percent said they are receiving one to five junk e-mails a day on average, and 37 percent are receiving five to 20 unsolicited mails.

Sixty-nine percent of the respondents said they found junk e- mails "disgusting".

Experts say unsolicited e-mails often carry computer viruses, attempts to defraud its recipients and extreme pornography. Sometimes spam can be used by hackers to paralyze websites, imposing threats to the security of Internet operation.

In the second half of March, Kingsoft handed out its anti-spam questionnaire to 100,000 people in more than 100 Chinese cities, including Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. The company spent over 4 million yuan (US$480,000) on the survey, the largest ever held in China.

China, a country with 68 million Internet users who receive 46 billion junk e-mails a year, has become the world's second largest destination for spam, after the United States.

The Internet Society of China (ISC) said that by the end of last November, China's Internet servers had received altogether 150 billion spam e-mails, accounting for 30 percent of the country 's total e-mails.

To curb the accelerated spam proliferation in China, the ISC and some leading domestic Internet service providers, including Sina, Netease and 263, are calling for establishment of an anti- spam technology alliance and removal of the regulatory barriers.

Insiders say Internet service providers and telecommunications operators should join hands to curb spam and safeguard network safety by working out more advanced screening technologies to stop junk e-mails at the source.

On the other hand, they have called on the nation's lawmakers to enact laws against junk e-mail. "We cannot just rely on alert netizens and filtering by websites," said Kong Xiangmei, a software expert and deputy with the National People's Congress, China's top legislature.

Kong and 34 other National People's Congress deputies submitted a joint proposal for enacting such a law to this year's NPC session.

The proposal recommends lawmakers ban junk mail in the communication links and outlaw junk mail transmission on mobile phones or the Internet, and mete out punishment for notorious offenders.

Following the NPC session's discussion of the issue, the State Council will open a seminar in April to discuss laws and regulations to enhance Internet safety.

A report from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) has warned that an estimated 50 percent of all e-mail messages in circulation by the end of 2003 could have been unsolicited spam, which may have cost as much as 20.5 billion dollars in wasted technical resources.

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