My Spam analysis for the week of July 5 - 11, 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 decreased 4% this week, to 52% of all my incoming email. This decline is partly caused by my rerouting all Russian language spam to a blackhole on my server. Previously, I allowed MailWasher to classify and auto-delete all Russian sent and Russian language spam. Now, only a few Russian senders (but English language) get through, only to be automatically deleted by my MailWasher Blacklist entry: +@+.ru
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 another typical variety of categories of spam, led by fake Viagra, illicit pharmaceuticals and male enhancement scams, followed by Russian senders, counterfeit watches, fake diplomas and pirated software. If you are using my custom MailWasher Pro filters, keep the filters for these types of spam near the top of the filters list, to minimize the impact on your CPU when analyzing incoming messages for spam content.
My blacklisted senders list was very effective this week, auto-deleting almost 19% of all incoming spam. Many (61) of this week's spam messages also included my own account names in the From and Subject and most were selling fake Viagra. This illegal spam practice is known as a "Joe Job" and it is used to slip spam past our own 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 July 5 - 11, 2010, and the latest additions to my custom MailWasher Pro filters and Blacklist.
MailWasher Pro spam category breakdown for July 5 - 11, 2010. Spam amounted to 52% of my incoming email this week. This represents -4% change from last week.
Here are some facts from my MailWasher Statistics for the past week. Of the 307 incoming email messages that were classified as spam, 237 were classified by my custom filters, 56 were from my custom Blacklist, and 2 from the DNS Servers Blacklist (mostly the SpamCop Blocklist (SBL)). I only saw 30 spam messages (but classified by filters set to manual deletion, for safety), 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.
Blacklisted Senders (dating scams & Viagra, etc): | 18.98% |
---|---|
Pharmaceutical Spam: | 17.63% |
Viagra: | 14.92% |
Male Enhancement Scams: | 10.17% |
Other Filters (misc filters): | 6.78% |
Russian Sender (& unreadable Russian language): | 6.44% |
Watches: | 6.10% |
Diploma scams: | 5.76% |
Known Spam Domain Links (mostly .RU): | 4.07% |
Pills: | 3.73% |
Pirated Software: | 3.05% |
Counterfeit Goods: | 1.69% |
DNS Blacklisted Servers: | 0.68% |
There were 3 updates to my custom spam filters this week, and no updates to the blacklist. The latest updates to my custom MailWasher Pro filters were to these filters:
Known Spam [From]
Pills
Amazon.com Scam
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
+@+.ua
+@+.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]
lovepil*@yahoo.com
[email protected]
+@+.net.co
lovepil*@yahoo.com
oemsoftware*@+
softwareoem*@+
*[email protected]
medical*@yahoo.com
+@+.roma6ka.com
[email protected]
Note: The blacklist expressions in large type are extremely effective! Note, that is you set a custom filter to Take Precedence over the Friends list, it also overrides the Blacklist, which is in the same file.
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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