My Spam analysis & filter updates for the week of June 12-19, 2011
After decreasing last week, this week's spam levels have remained at the same level. The majority of spammers are trying to sell counterfeit replica watches, followed by illicit prescription pharmaceuticals (sans the req'd prescription), male enhancement herbs, fake Viagra, weight loss drugs and even some Nigerian 419 scams. The various percentages of spam, by category, are listed in my extended comments.
This past week saw a return of the previously dead and buried Canadian Pharmacy scams. This time, the spam sender uses the name "Canadian-Pharmacy" and the faked destination website says "My Canadian Pharmacy." Other than the addition of "My," the rest is identical to the old websites. They are still hosted on botted PCs, controlled by Russian spam gangs and Bot Masters. The landing pages include logos with links to alleged Accreditation sources, all of which all go right back to the same fraudulent web page, on the botted PC. I wrote a full analysis of this new Canadian Pharmacy scam in a recent article.
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 12-19, 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%; 0% from last week
Number of messages classified as spam: 112
Number classified by my custom spam filters: 101
Number and percentage of spam according to my custom blacklist: 2
Number classified as spam by the Bayesian Learning filter: 0
Number classified as spam according to DNS Blocklists (SpamCop, Spamhaus, etc): 5
Number of spam messages seen, reported to SpamCop & manually deleted: 12
The order of spam categories, according to the highest percentages, is as follows:
Counterfeit Watches:25.00%
Pharmaceuticals: 17.59%
Male Enhancement scams: 13.89% (up ~7% from last week)
Fake Viagra and Cialis: 9.26% (down ~15%)
.BR, .CN, .RU Spam Domain Links: 8.33%
Other Filters (with small individual percentages): 6.48%
Known Spam [From]: 4.63%
DNS Blacklisted Servers: 4.63%
Non-English Language spam: 2.78%
Weight Loss Scams: 2.78% (down 50% from last week)
My Blacklist: 1.85%
Nigerian 419 scams: 1.85%
RE or FW spam: .093%
This week I made 4 updates and/or additions to my custom filters:
Diploma spam,
URL Shortener (Spam) Link,
Weight Loss Drugs.
(New) Accented Characters - Non-English Language
I made 0 additions to my custom Blacklist this week:
There was one false positive last week, leading to a slight modification of the Diplomas spam filter. 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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