My Spam analysis for 3rd week of September 2007
This article is about current email spam categories and percentages, based on rule sets created for and reported by the anti spam tool - MailWasher Pro.
I use MailWasher Pro to screen all of my various incoming POP email accounts, and for which I write my own custom spam filter rules. I give each rule a unique name so I can track the different types of spam I am deleting and reporting. The program has an interesting incoming email statistics window, that includes a pie chart breakdown of the various types of spam that are recognized and dealt with by the software. I thought I would start sharing my spam pie chart results with you all. This is the first installment, which I will try to update during, or at the end of the week. I'll post a new report each week, running from Monday through Sunday.
My analysis of this week's spam shows that various pharmaceuticals, including illicit prescription drugs, male and female enhancement pills and weight loss capsules lead the pack, totally a whopping 87% of all incoming spam. All of them have links to Chinese web hosts who are friends, or partners in crime with the spammers. The senders are all BotNetted computers with spam relays installed, and probably infected with the Storm Trojan.
Noticeably reduced this week were counterfeit watches and the Pump-And-Dump stocks scammer, but I see from the last few messages that the Pump and Dump spammer is about to unleash a new spam run, promoting a new penny stock scam.
My current statistics show that spam is 68% of all my incoming email, for the week of September 17 through 23, 2007. This is an 8% increase from the week before, which topped out at 60%
MailWasher Pro spam category breakdown for Sept 17 through 23, 2007.
| Pharmaceutical spam: | 43.43% |
|---|---|
| Male enhancement spam: | 30.00% |
| RX Spam: | 9.71% |
| Counterfeit Watches spam: | 0% |
| Casino spam: | 0.86% |
| Numeric IP scams: | .10% |
| Pirated software spam: | 1.71% |
| Pump & dump stocks: | .10% |
| Breast enlargement: | .60% |
| Weight loss pills: | 1.43% |
| Free NFL Tracker Trojan: | .10% |
| "DW" Spammer: | .10% |
| One word subjects: | 3.42% |
| RIPE filter: | .10% |
| Other filters: | 7.76% |
| DNS Blacklists: | .29% |
| Blacklisted: | .29% |
| Bayesian learning filter: | 0% |
These spam categories and their relative percentages will probably shift a bit each week, as the BotMasters send new spam scripts to the zombie computers under their control. I will try to keep the percentages updated and merge miscellaneous categories as I am able to identify what they were spamvertising.
If you are reading this and wondering what you can do to reduce the huge volumes of spam emails that must be overwhelming your POP client inboxes, I recommend MailWasher Pro (with my downloadable custom filters) as a front-end screener to your POP email program (Outlook, Outlook Express, Microsoft Mail, Thunderbird, Eudora, etc).
Regarding my custom MailWasher Pro spam filters; due to my continuing work of refining these filter rules, their accuracy has increased to the point that only a tad over 1% of the spam detections flew under my radar and was classified as DNS Blacklists, for this reporting period. All other spam was classified and dealt with by my filters.
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