Infosecurity notes that Brazil has topped the global spam ranking for January and February, with Panda reporting that the bulk of the spam messages are used primarily either to distribute threats or sell illicit products.

According to the IT security research firm, the main lure used as part of the social engineering techniques employed by the Brazilian spam messages is the promise of videos or photos of Brazilian girls.

For the research, Panda says it analysed nearly five million spam messages generated in January and February 2010, sent from one million different IP addresses around the world.

Brazil came in with 13.76% of spam, whilst India came in second with 10.98% and Korea with 6.32% of spam expressed as percentile of total messages analysed.

Interestingly, the UK came in 12th position in the ranking tables with just 2.34% of spam generated by 3.06% of IP addresses.

Analysing the figures on a city-by-city basis, Panda reports that Seoul was top of the rankings list, followed by Hanoi, New Delhi, Bogota, São Paulo and Bangkok.