Among the top ten most spammed states in the US, Illinois edged South Dakota for the dubious first place rating.

Spammers see no distinction between one victim and the next. Money serves as the common denominator in their money making efforts.

In the US, security vendor MessageLabs said some states grab higher levels of spam than others. One might think population makes the difference, as first place Illinois leads second place South Dakota and third place Oregon; Illinois has about triple the population of those two states combined.

However, Texas, at 23 million people, only rated eighth, trailing New Hampshire, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Indiana. “The varying spam levels across states can be attributed to different socioeconomic factors and levels of security awareness in each state,” Matt Sergeant of MessageLabs said in a statement.

“The states that are experiencing higher spam levels may not place as high a priority on IT security overall or employees and businesses may be more willing to share their personal contact information in public domains.”

Pennsylvania and Alabama followed Texas in rounding out the top ten spammed states.

Our guess would be that a correlation exists between these spam levels and the percentage of machines per state that have been compromised and made part of a bot network. If the attacks used to gain access to vulnerable machines include grabbing local email address books, especially on a business network, perhaps the global scourge of spam is more local in nature.