My Spam analysis & filter updates for the week of Dec 20 - 26, 2010
With Christmas just over, spammers took what they could from the pockets of gullible Netizens. They used a variety of come-ons, including appeals to male vanity and a few Trojans to deceive and rob people of their hard earned money.
This week, spammers are still promoting fake Viagra, counterfeit watches, bogus male enlargement herbs and pills, illegal to import prescription drugs, fake e-cards (malware) and Russian dating scams.
This past 7 days, spam for various types of garbage amounted to 48% 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 20 - 26, 2010. These classifications are based upon my own custom MailWasher spam filters.
Percentage classified as spam: 48%; up 1% from last week Number of messages classified as spam: 240 Number classified by my custom spam filters: 237 Number and percentage of spam according to my custom blacklist: 3 Number classified as spam according to DNS Blocklists (SpamCop, Spamhaus, etc): 0 Number of spam messages seen, reported to SpamCop & manually deleted: 5The order of spam according to the highest percentages, is as follows:
Fake Viagra and Cialis: 24.58% Male Enhancement scams: 20.83% Counterfeit (Rolex, etc) Watches: 19.58% Pharmaceuticals and fake prescription drugs: 16.67% Known Spam Domains in links (usually Russian: .RU): 10.83% Dating (Russian Bride scams): 3.75% Blacklisted sender names and domains: 1.26% Other miscellaneous filters (small percentages each): 1.25% Charset=iso-8859-2 (Latvia, etc): 0.83% Nigerian Lottery Scam: 0.42%
I made 2 additions/updates to my custom filters:
APNIC,
Known Spam Domains
I made 1 change to my custom Blacklist:
*e-card-delivery@+
Watch out for those fake e-cards this holiday season. They all lead to malware attacks that will hit your browsers with over a dozen exploit attempts. If just one of the installed pieces of software is a vulnerable version, your PC could be taken over by criminals without your knowledge. If your PC gets owned by cybercriminals, it will probably become a member of a criminal Botnet. This means that your computer will become a spam sending tool and may also be used as an attack tool against websites and Governments.
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 and all of the fake Viagra pills and enlargement scams that appear every day. Fake drugs may harm or kill you and are illegal to import into the USA and Canada and subject to seizure by Customs.
Take my advice and never reply to spam email, just delete it. Don't bother trying to unsubscribe from spam mail lists. Nobody ever gets de-listed; you will only confirm that your email address is valid by using the bogus unsubscribe links. Think about it: if you never signed up to receive the (fake) goods advertised in a spam email, why should you have to unsubscribe? The unsubscribe links are not honored. However, people using them are added to databases of proven live accounts and their names are sold to other spammers.
If you are tricked by an email message into visiting a malware attack site, scan your computer for acquired malware threats using the legitimate online scanner at http://housecall.trendmicro.com, or at kaspersky.com.
If malware is found, their scanners can remove most of it. If not, download a trial version of Trend Micro Internet Security. You can read about it and download it from my webpage about Trend Micro security products.
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