UK under persistent email attack, researchers say

Some interesting research from security outfit Proofpoint was published this morning which reveals that unsolicited email heading towards users in the UK is three times more likely to contain malicious URLs than that destined for users in the United States, or Germany, or France for that matter. It's not, as you may think at first glance, just a matter of the UK getting more spam. The research conducted over the summer, using the US as a baseline, shows Germany getting more spam as a percentage than the UK, US and France. The prevalence of spam and malicious URLs in the total email traffic are not, Proofpoint conclude, therefore correlated. Instead, UK users are being targeted with less spam but with a higher volume of infected spam. Compared to Germany, as much as five times as high in fact. Which begs the question 'why are cybercriminals targeting the UK so relentlessly when compared to other nations?'