New Brunswick is Canada's spam king

New Brunswick is the most spammed province in Canada.

The province's junk email rate of 92.5 per cent is even higher than the global average of 89.3 per cent.

And one of the reasons we're getting the most spam in our inbox may be because we've been so successful in getting everybody access to high-speed Internet.

"That is always a concern," said Paul Wood, MessageLabs Intelligence senior analyst for Symantec Hosted Services, in a telephone interview from the United Kingdom on Thursday.

"We have seen that in other parts of the world where ... they have a plan to roll out high-speed, broadband connections."

New Brunswick is the only province in Canada with 100 per cent coverage of broadband Internet.

The Liberal government just finished a $13-million project to extend that coverage to all rural areas at rates that match urban areas.

"The fact that you have more people online means you have more computers that can be exploited or compromised," said Wood.

Social media such as Facebook is particularly bad for providing information for spammers, he said.

"The information we post about ourselves can be very valuable to the bad guys," said Wood. "We really need to understand what we are doing online and why we are doing it.

"We need to be a bit more careful about what we post about ourselves."

MessageLabs Intelligence is an Internet security company with 30,000 Internet business clients around the world in 100 countries.

Last month, the company did an analysis of the spam it's been blocking for the last 10 months to come up with information on who's suffering from the most spam. So why is New Brunswick so hard hit by unsolicited email, besides the fact we have lots of new people online?

"From a spammers' perspective, they don't really care where you are so they are not particularly targeting New Brunswick," said Wood.

"What we find is it's the type of businesses and even the size of businesses and even how they use email ... that are factors that are more likely to determine the amount of spam you will receive.

"New Brunswick seems to have a slightly higher density of those businesses."

Spammers combine dictionaries of first and last names to come up with email addresses and that seems to hit home and small- and medium-sized businesses harder than large businesses, he said.

Another factor is the type of business.

Wood said the hospitality sector gets hit hard at 92.3 per cent because it tends to communicate person-to-person.

To fight spam, Symantec makes the following recommendations:

* use your real email address only for trusted contacts and use disposable email addresses for other online use;

* never reply to unsolicited emails;

* never click on hyperlinks in unsolicited emails;

* don't open attachments in spam emails;

* don't open pictures in unsolicited email;

* use privacy controls on social media;

*beware of spam-related to major news stories, which are used by spammers to get you to open unsolicited email;

Wood said spam is a global problem, with 120 billion new unsolicited emails sent every day.

While New Brunswick is the most spammed province in Canada, the gap between first and last isn't huge, said Wood.

Newfoundland is the lowest province at 86 per cent.

"It is only a matter of a few percentage points and that gap is narrowly ... as more businesses get online," he said.