My Spam analysis & filter updates for the week of Sept 27 - Oct 3, 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 decreased 2% this week, to 58% of all my incoming email. Most of the spam was typical junkmail for counterfeit Chinese watches, fake Cialis and Viagra, illicit prescription drugs and male enhancement scams. There were also some new variations of malware in attachments scams, in fake CV resumes in zip files. There was a dangerous link spam campaign, posing as LinkedIn messages, leading to serious exploit attacks and the Zeus banking credential stealing Trojan. Finally, there was spam for fake diplomas, and some pirated OEM software, hosted on Russian domains.
The LinkedIn attack was coordinated and sent (via Botnets) by the same people behind the malware infected fake CV resumes (Zeus Trojan). They are headquartered in The Ukraine and 5 of them were just arrested this week. Another 11 were arrested in The UK and dozens more were arrested or had warrants issued in the USA. Almost all are Russians, Ukrainians and people from other Eastern European countries. Quite a few in the US are Russian students here on J1 Student Visas.
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 Sept 27 - Oct 3, 2010, and the latest additions to my custom MailWasher Pro filters and Blacklist.
MailWasher Pro spam category breakdown for Sept 27 - Oct 3, 2010. Spam amounted to 58% of my incoming email this week. This represents -2% change from last week.
Effective August 22, 2010, the custom filters are written for all versions of MailWasher versions. There is a brand new version 2010 that was just released in July, 2010, which uses a totally different xml filter format. After many hours of hand editing, I have converted the old filters into the new xml format. You can download my spam filters from my MailWasher Pro spam filters page
Here are some facts from my MailWasher Statistics for the past week. Of the 492 incoming email messages that were classified as spam, 467 were classified by my custom filters, 11 were deleted by my custom Blacklist, and 4 from the DNS Servers Blacklist (mostly the SpamCop Blocklist (SBL)). I actually saw 65 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 other custom filters and Blacklist. See the updates to my filters below the spam categories list.
Fake Cialis & Viagra (dangerous): | 33.82% |
---|---|
Other Filters (misc filters with small percentages): | 11.00% |
Pills: | 9.75% |
Known Spam Domain Links (mostly .RU - Russian): | 9.75% |
Male Enhancement Scams (fake & dangerous): | 7.68% |
Pharmaceutical Spam (dangerous & illegal): | 7.05% |
Exploit Links (to Zeus and attack sites): | 6.22% |
Watches (junk knockoffs): | 4.56% |
Known Spam From: | 2.49% |
Diploma scams: | 2.49% |
Blacklisted Senders (dating scams & Viagra, etc): | 2.28% |
Pics scams: | 2.07% |
DNS Blacklists (SpamCop, Spamhaus, etc): | 0.83% |
There were 5 updates and 1 new filter added to my custom spam filters this week. The latest updates to my custom MailWasher Pro filters were to these filters:
Courier Scam #3
Porn Spam
Viagra Spam [From]
Yahoo Spam
New filter: LinkedIn Scam (added and updated)
Blacklist updates this week:
None
Note, that the Blacklist works in both the old and new versions of MailWasher Pro. You can import the Blacklist from version 6.x when you move up to MailWasher Pro 2010 and newer.
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 $29.95, with an annual renewal fee of only $9.95, to cover the costs of development and the FirstAlert community spam database.
All of the spam and scams targeting my numerous 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.
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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