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Project Honey Pot – a distributed system for identifying spammers and the spambots they use to scrape email addresses from the Web – received its billionth email spam message on Wednesday, December 9, 2009 at 06:20 (GMT). It was a United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS) phishing scam.
To celebrate this milestone, Project Honey Pot which came into existence in 2004, sifted through their collected data to learn more about spam and spammers who send it. Some highlights:
- Monday is the busiest day of the week for email spam, Saturday is the quietest.
- 12:00 (GMT) is the busiest hour of the day for spam, 23:00 (GMT) is the quietest.
- Malicious bots have increased at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 378% since Project Honey Pot started.
- Over the last five years, you’d have been 9 times more likely to get a phishing message for Chase Bank than Bank of America, however Facebook is rapidly becoming the most phished organization online.
- Finland has some of the best computer security in the world, China some of the worst.
- It takes the average spammer 2 and a half weeks from when they first harvest your email address to when they send you your first spam message, but that’s twice as fast as they were five years ago.
- Every time your email address is harvested from a website, you can expect to receive more than 850 spam messages.
- Spammers take holidays too: spam volumes drop nearly 21% on Christmas Day and 32% on New Year’s Day.
- The word “Viagra” was spelled at least 956 different ways in order to try and trick spam filters (e.g., VIAGRA, V1AGRA, V1@GR@, V!AGRA, VIA6RA, etc.).
- Today Facebook is the second most phished organization online and, if current trends continue, is on track to take the top spot in 2010.
The full report is available at 1 Billion Spammers Served | Project Honey Pot
Malware Help. Org as a member of Project Honeypot is proud to have helped the community in a small way by catching a few spam harvesters.
Malware Help helped in catching these harvesters.
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