Text Messaging Featured Article

Unless we’re talking about the canned meat, spam is never wanted. But not all spam is equally bad. While e-mail spam is annoying, it also is easy enough to work around. The same goes for comment spam in blog posts.

Where spam gets most troubling is when it comes to our phones—spam by text message can be quite harmful, in that we often check our phones when new messages come in. When this check of our phone is due to spam, it really hits home because this junk mail costs us real time—and we’re more powerless to fend it off because unlike e-mail spam, there’s little we can do to stop it.

Well, it turns out that where you live affects how much you are hassled by this most harmful type of spam. Just as you get more robo-calls during campaign season if you live in a battleground state such as Ohio, so too do you get more text message spam if you live in a particular geographic location.

We know this thanks to some nifty research by mobile security vendor, AdaptiveMobile (News - Alert). The company recently visualized text message spam, and not every area was created equal.

The areas hardest hit by text message spam included South Florida, Dallas and Chicago, AdaptiveMobile discovered. If you live in one of those areas, you are not crazy when you think that you’re getting more spam than your cousins in New Hampshire.

Nearly every mobile user in Florida is targeted with at least one spam message each year, according to the company; the rate is one in three if you live in DC.

The research showed that the best place to live when it comes to spam is North Dakota, where only one in every 20 people gets a text message spam message on average each year.

This is, perhaps, the first time visualization has been created that charts overall text message use in the United States.

“This high-level view of all SMS spam across the United States for September and October is a powerful means in identifying the people most targeted by the messages as well as the areas generating the most amount of SMS spam,” said Cathal McDaid, Head of Security Operations at AdaptiveMobile.

“We now know that where you live in the United States can determine how much SMS spam you can expect to receive each year,” she added. “Having this level of detail will allow mobile operators to better combat the threat. In addition the visualizations give a stunning, unique view of both how mobile spam is sent and how mobile spam is evolving.”

The visualization also showed where text spam is originating. Unsurprisingly, the home of porn is also the home of spam; Los Angeles generated the most spam in the United States and was responsible for a pump-and-dump scam that spread across the Internet, according to the company. South Florida also is home of many spam campaigns, the research showed.