My Spam analysis for the week of May 10 - 16, 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.
Spam levels have increased 3% this week, to 60% of all my incoming email. Fluctuations in spam levels sometimes are seasonal, or may be due to problems or successes Bot-masters have with maintaining the command and control (C&C) servers used to reactivate sleeping zombie computers in their spam Botnets. Or, these changes in spam levels may be caused when large numbers of zombie computers are disinfected, or taken offline by the ISPs who provide Internet connectivity to them. In case you didn't already know this, almost all spam is now sent from "zombie" computers in spam Botnets, unbeknownst to the owners of those infected PCs.
The classifications of spam in my analysis can help you adjust your email filters according to what is most common, on a weekly basis. This past week again saw a typical variety of categories of spam, led by counterfeit Viagra and other illicit and counterfeit pharmaceuticals, including spam for the totally fake Canadian Pharmacy. Other categories of spam included counterfeit watches, Trojan attachments in fake resumes, Nigerian 419 scams and fake diplomas. Keep the Viagra, Canadian Pharmacy, Male Enhancement, 419 Scams and the counterfeit Watches filters high up your list of custom filters, to minimize the impact on your CPU when analyzing incoming messages for spam content.
By the way, the zipfile attachments claiming to be a resume in CV format actually contain Trojan downloaders. Open them on a Windows PC and you will probably become Botnetted!
My updated blacklisted senders list proved quite effective this week, auto-deleting ~17% of all incoming spam (see my extended content for details). I saw a big increase in the number of emails forging my own accounts as the senders, with 96 this week, which was ~20% of my total spam. Many of these spam messages also included the same account names in the Subject. This illegal practice is known as a "Joe Job" and it is used to slip spam past our filters. Joe Jobs depend on people white-listing their own accounts and domains. Fortunately, MailWasher custom filters allow you to override the friends list, so you can easily detect and delete Joe Job spam, if you are using MailWasher Pro as your spam filter.
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. This practice 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 May 10 - 16, 2010, and the latest additions to my custom MailWasher Pro filters and Blacklist.
MailWasher Pro spam category breakdown for May 10 - 16, 2010. Spam amounted to 60% of my incoming email this week. This represents +3% change from last week.
Here are some facts from my MailWasher Statistics for the past week. Of the 481 incoming email messages that were classified as spam, 380 were classified by my custom filters, 82 were from my custom Blacklist and 1 from the DNS Servers Blacklist (mostly the SpamCop Blocklist (SBL)). I actually only saw 31 spam messages, all of which I reported through my SpamCop reporting account. The rest were automatically deleted by my custom filters and Blacklist. See the updates to my filters below the spam categories list.
Viagra: | 36.72% |
---|---|
Blacklisted Senders (dating scams & Viagra, etc): | 17.71% |
Pharmaceutical Spam: | 9.29% |
Known Spam Domains: | 8.64% |
Canadian Pharmacy Scams: | 6.70% |
Other Filters (misc filters): | 5.40% |
Watches: | 4.75% |
Male Enhancement Scams: | 3.02% |
Russian Sender (& unreadable Russian language): | 3.02% |
Nigerian 419 Scams: | 2.59% |
Trojan zip attachments (fake resumes): | 1.08% |
Diploma scams: | 0.86% |
DNS Blacklisted Servers: | 0.22% |
This was another slow week for updates/tweaking to my custom spam filters. There were several additions to the various pharmaceutical spam filters, to respond to new subjects and body text used by spammers and to improve those filters. The latest updates to my custom MailWasher Pro filters were to these filters:
Known Spam [From]
Live.com Spam Link
Male Enhancement [B]
Nigerian 419 Scam #5
Pharmaceuticals [B]
Watches
The following recent MailWasher Pro Email Blacklist entries were able to block ~19% of this week's spam. Some weeks will have higher percentages of blacklisted senders, depending on which Botnets are used to send those messages, with forged sender names and email addresses. Since the Blacklist is processed before the custom filters, the processing time and cpu load is greatly reduced.
+@+.br
+@+.cn
+@+.de
+@+.es
+@+.gr
+@+.hk
+@+.in
+@+.jp
+@+.kr
+@+.ru
+@+.tw
+@+.vn
[email protected]
+@*.hinet.net
+@*ukrtel.net
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
notification*@googlemail.com
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
*discount*@yahoo.com
*viagra*@+
[email protected] (still an Important filter!)
lovepil*@yahoo.com (New)
[email protected] (New)
+@+.net.co (New)
About MailWasher Pro
MailWasher Pro intercepts POP3 and IMAP email before you download it to your desktop email client (e.g: Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Live Mail) and scans it for threats or spam content, then either manually or automatically deletes any messages matching your pre-determined criteria and custom filters. It is my primary line of defense against incoming spam, scams, phishing and exploit attacks. If you are not already using this fine anti-spam tool I invite to to read about it on my MailWasher Pro web page. You can download the latest version and try it for free for a month. Registration costs just $39.95 and is only required once, for the life of the program.
All of the spam and scams targeting my accounts were either automatically deleted by my custom MailWasher Pro spam filters, or if they made it through, was reported to SpamCop, of which I am a reporting member, and manually deleted. MailWasher Pro is able to forward messages marked as spam to SpamCop, which then sends a confirmation email to you, containing a link. You must click on the enclosed reporting link and open it in your browser, then manually submit your report. This is how SpamCop wants it done.
If you use a POP email client on your desktop to send and receive your email, rather than your browser, you too will benefit from the added protection that MailWasher Pro provides. I can't even begin to tell you how many dangerous attachments, exploit encoded messages, 419 fraud, as well as courier, bank, eBay and PayPal phishing scams, plus hundreds of hostile link emails it has deleted, after identifying them with my rules and its own heuristic and known spam detections.
I am available for hire to write custom MailWasher Pro filters for you or your company. They require that you have a copy of MailWasher on each computer to be customized.
Finally, many security threats will come to you via spam email; some in hostile attachments, some as "phishing" scams, some as financial fraud or money laundering scams, and many more in links to web pages rigged to serve up exploit codes or Trojan downloads.You need really good up-to-date protection to fight off the multitude of attack codes flying like machine gun bullets these days. To protect your computer from web pages rigged with exploit codes, malware in email attachments, dangerous links to hostile web pages, JavaScript redirects, Phishing scams, or router DNS attack codes, I recommend Trend Micro Internet Security (or Internet Security Pro for travelers). It has strong realtime monitoring modules that stop rootkits and spam Trojans from installing themselves into your operating system. Also known as PC-cillin, it is very frequently updated as new and altered malware definitions become available and it checks for web based threats and new malware definitions by searching secure online servers owned by Trend Micro. This is referred to as "in-the-cloud" security. Best of all, you can try it fully functional for a month, then decide to pay to keep it or uninstall it.
See you all next week, same time, same station! Keep the sunny side up and don't take no wooden nickles!
Wiz - out
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