My Spam analysis & filter updates for the week of Aug 23 - 29, 2010
This is the latest entry in my weekly series about classifications of spam, according to my custom filter rules used by MailWasher Pro. The categories are shown on the "Statistics" page > "Junk Mail," as a pie chart, based on my custom filters and blacklist. The amount of email flagged as spam is shown on the "Summary" page of Statistics. These reports can help you adjust the order of your own spam filters.
MailWasher Pro is a POP3 and IMAP email spam screener that checks email before it is downloaded to your desktop email client. It can be set to delete recognized spam either manually or automatically when a user-defined filter, or the built-in learning filter, or a blacklist entry, or known spam source is matched, or an attached virus is detected.
My incoming spam levels have increased 6% this week, to 54% of all my incoming email. I saw a few new courier infected attachment exploits this week. All the the rest of the spam was typical junkmail for counterfeit Chinese watches, fake Cialis and Viagra, illicit prescription drugs, male enhancement scams, pirated software, and fake diploma scams.
The classifications of spam in my analysis (below) can help you adjust your email filters according to what is most common, on a weekly basis. If you are using my custom MailWasher Pro filters, keep the filters for the highest percentage categories of spam near the top of the filters list, to minimize the impact on your CPU when analyzing incoming messages for spam content.
Since virtually all spam is now sent from and hosted on hijacked PCs that are zombie members of various spam Botnets and all email sender addresses are forged, there is no point in complaining to the listed From or Reply To address. These accounts are inserted by the same script that composes the spam on the compromised PCs. These are innocent spam victims themselves, whose harvested names are reused in forged From addresses.
Sometimes, your own email address is forged as the sender, as well as being the recipient. The practice of forging the recipient's own email address in the From field is known as a "Joe Job." Fortunately, MailWasher Pro has a custom filter option that overrides the "Friends" list (a Whitelist of approved senders), allowing user created spam filters to read the content and flag or auto delete spam that's using one's own accounts as the forged sender.
You can take preventative measures to secure your computers from becoming members of Botnets, by installing Trend Micro Internet Security and MalwareBytes Anti-Malware (see pages for details).
See my extended comments for this week's breakdown of spam by category, for August 23 - 29, 2010, and the latest additions to my custom MailWasher Pro filters and Blacklist.
Continue reading "My Spam analysis & filter updates for the week of Aug 23 - 29, 2010" »
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Wiz's Blog is written by Bob "Wiz" Feinberg, an experienced freelance computer consultant, troubleshooter and webmaster. Wiz's specialty is in computer and website security. 
