My Spam analysis & filter updates for the week of June 5-12, 2011
After an increase last week, this week's spam levels have decreased again. This yo-yo effect is possibly due to problems Bot Masters are having maintaining their spam botnets, in the face of strong pressure from Microsoft, the DOJ, FireEye and cooperation from law enforcement authorities in Russia. The various percentages of spam, by category, are listed in my extended comments.
Bot Masters, who send the orders and templates to the zombie spambots (robot agents on infected personal computers), depend on professional or newly recruited spammers to pay to rent the use of their botnets. Competition among botnet owners, dis-infection of botted PCs and interference from authorities tends to drive prices down for some services and up for others. These days, there seems to be more money to be made by renting out botnets for use in denial of service attacks, than for sending e-junk mail.
Despite fluctuations in volumes of junk email, spam is still going strong. It's not just nuisance messages you need to look out for. There are many critical security threats contained in attachments and links to exploit sites, which are designed to infect your computers with malware. Keyloggers, disguised as Flash upgrades, missing codecs, scanned documents, or resumes in attachments, silently log your keystrokes when you log into your online bank, or PayPal, or your website control panel, stealing your credentials, then you money or company secrets. Therefore, effective email protection is required to protect your computers, your money and your data. MailWasher Pro is the program I use to detect and delete spam and email-borne security threats. My spam statistics are obtained from the program, showing how effective it is as a spam fighting tool.
This past 7 days, spam for various types of garbage amounted to 26% of my incoming email. This is according to MailWasher Pro, which I use to screen incoming email before downloading it to my desktop email program (Windows Live Mail). I report any spam messages that make it through my auto-delete filters to SpamCop.
Here are some statistics regarding the spam received and categorized, from June 5-12, 2011. These classifications are based upon my own custom MailWasher spam filters. Most of this spam is automatically deleted by MailWasher Pro and my custom filters. The statistics are obtained from the program's logs.
Statistics Overview
Percentage classified as spam:26%; -3% from last week
Number of messages classified as spam: 98
Number classified by my custom spam filters: 96
Number and percentage of spam according to my custom blacklist: 1
Number classified as spam by the Bayesian Learning filter: 1
Number classified as spam according to DNS Blocklists (SpamCop, Spamhaus, etc): 1
Number of spam messages seen, reported to SpamCop & manually deleted: 7
The order of spam categories, according to the highest percentages, is as follows:
Counterfeit Watches:31.63%
Fake Viagra and Cialis: 24.49%
.BR, .CN, .RU Spam Domain Links: 11.22%
Pharmaceuticals: 8.16%
Male Enhancement scams: 6.12% (up 5% from last week)
Weight Loss Scams: 5.10% (down 7% from last week)
Known Spam [From]: 3.06%
Other Filters (with small individual percentages): 2.04%
Lottery scams: 2.04%
Nigerian 419 scams: 2.04%
Blocked Countries filter: 2.04%
DNS Blacklisted Servers: 1.02%
My Blacklist: 1.02%
This week I made 2 updates and/or additions to my custom filters:
Watches Spam,
Weight Loss Drugs
I made 0 additions to my custom Blacklist this week:
There were no false positives last week. All filters behaved as intended. Note, that I now publish three types of spam filters for MailWasher Pro. One type is for the latest 2011 series, in xml format, and two are for the previous series 6.x. One of those filters is set for manual deletions and the other for automatic deletions. You can read all about MailWasher Pro and the filters I write for it, on my MailWasher Pro Custom Filters page.
If you are having trouble caused by excess volumes of spam email, and are not using an effective filter, why not try out MailWasher Pro? It sure works for me!
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