If there were any doubt about the volume of internet scam in Nigeria, a recent research, which declared Nigeria as having the world's most crime-riddled Internet service provider (ISP), would have cleared the doubt. The Nigerian-based ISP is SpectraNet, said the new research, which was conducted by Giovane Cesar Moreira Moura, at the Centre for Telematics and Information Technology in The Netherlands.

It says that 63 per cent of site addresses hosted on SpectraNet's servers were found to be sending spam -- the highest proportion among 42,201 ISPs.

Crime tended to be concentrated in small areas. A single Indian ISP was found to be uniquely responsible for 7 per cent of the spamming website addresses in the world. Twenty of 42,201 ISPs monitored for Mr. Moreira Moura's thesis created almost half of the world's spam.

Moura suggests that online crime is distributed in a similar way to the real world with higher rates concentrated in particular neighbourhoods. The neighbourhood model has implications for cyber-security.

The idea behind the 'Internet Bad Neighbourhood' concept is that the probability of a host in behaving badly increases if its neighbouring hosts (i.e. hosts within the same sub-network) also behave badly. This idea, in turn, can be exploited to improve current Internet security solutions, since it provides an indirect approach to predict new sources of attacks (neighbouring hosts of malicious ones).

We contacted SpectraNet for comment but they had not responded by the time of publication.