MOUNTAIN VIEW, Ca. – In its’ latest spam report, McAfee Inc. says corporate marketing departments could learn a thing or two on how to better target customers. And governments around the world could improve their national and international business prospects by aggressively combating illegal Internet activities, but don’t hold your breath.

Spammers understand their “customers,” regardless of the country their victims reside in, and tailor the message to suit the audience. They also protect themselves by aiming at users in other countries, thus diminishing the interest of local governments in putting a stop to their actions.

Dave Marcus, director, Security Research and Communications, McAfee Avert Labs, said we’ve now hit an all-time high (or low, depending on your perspective). That is to say, we’re currently experiencing the highest amount of spam on a monthly basis in history to date.

“We’ve recovered from ISPs getting taken offline; we saw a huge dip in spam for a little while. Now we’re at newer, higher levels of spam of any other month previously,” he said.

Also noteworthy, the international flavors of spam. “Things are really different country to country . . . they (spammers) do a real interesting job of messaging to different countries and that’s absolutely fascinating,” he said. “The bad guys are adept at picking up on nuances . . . they’re pretty clever at picking up on things that local audiences will key in on and click ‘yes’ to something.”

According to McAfee’s July 2009 spam report, “spam has a long-term effect on international commerce. It can occur when administrators decide to block a sender’s IP based entirely on geo-location — the ‘from’ domain — or by not allowing foreign languages or URLs into their domain. Actions such as these generally stem from foreign-language spams reaching executive decision makers who then demand an administrator respond to specific language-based criteria. These sorts of policy decisions are unlikely to be regularly reviewed, and represent a digital bias against certain languages or countries that could affect legitimate communications.”

The long-term economic interests of countries that don’t regulate questionable hosting providers and domain registrars can suffer significantly because of these short-sighted policies, the report continued. The enormous prevalence of Chinese and Russian URLs in pharmacy spam mails causes people to want to block every incoming email from these countries, just to be safe. From a business perspective, the institutions providing the domain registrations for spammers cripple the opportunities for legitimate domains; they are branded guilty by association and are often blocked along with the rest.

Until government regulators, together with local and international law enforcement, start cracking down on illegal Internet activities, it will be extremely difficult for companies to win business in international marketplaces, McAfee said.

“What goes on in the underground is simply a reflection of what’s happening on the Internet . . . you’re going to have a corresponding spike in cybercrime,” he said. “Most governments are completely hampered to truthfully do anything about it.”

Corporations should also review policy decisions that are based on reactions to spam. One-shot policies often ignore the continuing evolution of spam over the long term; as spam changes, security effectiveness can erode and actually create a situation in which a company actually has less security and suffers from more false-positives.

Education is the best defense to reducing the damage caused by spam, Marcus added. But at what point does the western world with its experience in online computing finally wise-up to the reality that is spam?

“I think sometimes the only people who listen to security information are people working in the security industry and journalists,” he quipped. “People tend to be trusting; they accept what’s presented to them. They click before they think . . . to surf on today’s Internet unprotected and uneducated, it’s going to get you owned.”

The report also noted Canada gets a few more delivery-status messages than the .com world, but as in the United Kingdom, the Canadians are dominated by pharmacy spam. The strains leading to ‘.ca’ domains have fewer one-word greeting subjects than most other domains.

This column was written by Liam Lahey of ConnectIT, an IntegratedMarCompany

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