My Spam analysis & filter updates for the week of June 19-26, 2011
This week's spam levels have remained at about the same level as last week. The majority of spammers are trying to sell counterfeit pharmaceuticals and replica watches, followed by weight loss herbs, male enhancement gimmicks, fake Viagra, and some Nigerian lottery and 419 scams. The various percentages of spam, by category, are listed in my extended comments.
This past week saw a continuation of the previously dead and buried Canadian Pharmacy scams. However, spammers are affiliates of various fake pharmacy programs. They pay Bot Masters to lease the use of zombie computers making up spam botnets. Spammers expect to be paid for the traffic they drive to the fake pharmacies. It so happens that the co-founder of one of the remaining major spam payment processors, Chronopay, has been arrested in Russia. Directly related to his arrest, several affiliate payment systems related to his RX-Promotions spam business are going offline (details to follow soon).
Canadian Pharmacy is one of the spam programs created, managed and paid for in Russia. I expect to see a big drop in all variations of Canadian Pharmacy spam, in the next week or so. No pay, no spam!
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 27% 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 19-26, 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: 27%; +1% from last week
Number of messages classified as spam: 119
Number classified by my custom spam filters: 115
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): 1
Number of spam messages seen, reported to SpamCop & manually deleted: 15
The order of spam categories, according to the highest percentages, is as follows:
Pharmaceuticals: 26.27%
Counterfeit Watches:24.58%
Weight Loss Scams: 12.71%
Male Enhancement scams: 10.17%
.BR, .CN, .RU, UA Spam Domain Links: 6.78%
Other Filters (with small individual percentages): 5.08%
Fake Viagra and Cialis: 3.39%
Lottery Scams: 3.39%
Known Spam Domains: 1.69%
My Blacklist: 1.69%
Nigerian 419 scams: 1.69%
Subject All Caps (419 scams): 1.69%
DNS Blacklisted Servers: 0.85%
This week I made 5 updates and/or additions to my custom filters:
.BR .CN .RU .UA Domain Link,
Exploit Link,
Known Spam Domains,
Nigerian 419 Scam #6,
Russian Bride Scam
I made 1 addition to my custom Blacklist this week:
[email protected]
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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