According to research, China will soon overtake the US as a top sender of unsolicited mass email (yes, that’s spam).

Statistics from security firm Sophos show that China is fast catching up the US as a source of junk e-mail. According to Sophos, 23.1% of spam comes from computers in the US and 21.9% comes from China.

As a continent, Asia is the biggest source with 42.8% of unwanted commercial e-mail coming from that region.

However, given the nature of spam as usually being transmitted via “zombie” computers–or those hijacked and then controlled via malicious software (rootkits, trojans, worms), perhaps the correct geographic distribution of the root sources of spam is more difficult to estimate.