My Spam analysis & filter updates for the week of Dec 6 - 12. 2010
With Christmas around the corner, spammers are ramping up their efforts to get some of your hard earned dollars and infect more machines, for use in Botnets. There is a virtual flood of crap mail deluging email inboxes this week, mostly hawking things like fake Viagra, counterfeit watches and designer bags and jewelry, illegal to import prescription drugs, bogus male enlargement herbs and pills, the tail end of a Pump and Dump penny stock scam (DYNV) scam and a handful of work at home money laundering scams (money mule recruiters for bank account stealing Trojans, like Zeus and similar info stealing Bots). There were a few phishing scams thrown into the mix, earlier in the week.
This past 7 days, spam for various types of garbage amounted to 51% 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 often see the same spam message sent to several of my accounts at the same time. 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 December 6 - 12, 2010. These classifications are based upon my own custom MailWasher spam filters.
Percentage classified as spam: 51%; down 5% from last week Number of messages classified as spam: 370 Number classified by my custom spam filters: 353 Number and percentage of spam according to my custom blacklist: 15 Number classified as spam according to DNS Blocklists (SpamCop, Spamhaus, etc): 2 Number of spam messages seen, reported to SpamCop & manually deleted: 39The order of spam according to the highest percentages, is as follows:
Fake Viagra and Cialis: 37.30% Counterfeit (Rolex, etc) Watches: 14.05% Pharmaceuticals and fake prescription drugs: 13.24% Male Enhancement scams: 7.30% Other miscellaneous filters (small percentages each): 6.22% Known Spam Domains in links (usually Russian: .RU): 5.68% Counterfeit Goods: 5.41% Blacklisted sender names and domains: 4.05% Charset=iso-8859-2 (Latvia, etc): 2.16% Numeric IP hostile link (hijacked PCs): 1.62% Russian Sender: 1.35% Work At Home Scams (money laundering stolen funds): 1.08% DNS Blacklisted Servers: 00.54%
I made 1 additions/updates to my custom filters:
Counterfeit Goods
I made no changes to my custom Blacklist:
Take my advice and never reply to spam email, just delete it. Never buy anything that is spamvertised. If you do, you will give your credit or debit card details to hardened criminals, in far away places. If you purchase illicit controlled drugs from abroad, they are subject to seizure by US Customs. It is against the law to import prescription drugs without a valid prescription issued by a physician who is validly licensed in the USA.
A word regarding knockoff watches: they are made in China, have no applicable warranty, cannot be returned if defective, are sold by criminal spammers, and are inferior to the real items they are copying. If you buy a counterfeit name brand watch, know that a fool and his money soon will part! Ditto for fake diplomas that are offered from time to time.
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