My Spam analysis & filter updates for the week of Aug 15 - 21, 2011
This week I am changing the nature of my spam report. In all previous articles, I used the "Statistics" from MailWasher Pro, version 6.x. However, this past week I switched to the latest version of MailWasher Pro: 2011. At this time it lacks a "Statistics" readout, so I have compiled my own stats. They reveal some interesting facts about this week's email spam.
The first thing I learned when going over the spam categories, in the MailWasher Pro Recycle Bin, was that the overall volume of spam is way up from last week. For the week ending on August 14, 2011, the total amount of spam received was 128. This week, ending August 21, the total was 175, as of the time I wrote this. Without an exact stat report, I am guesstimating that this represents about 33% of my total email this past week. That would make it about 5% more than last week.
Of these 175 spam emails, 169 were identified by my custom spam filters. Six more were classified as spam manually and inputted into the learning filter, for future detections. The majority of spam was 44 messages touting fake Cialis. This was followed by 24 for counterfeit watches. Next in line was 15 emails promoting male enhancement herbs, then 13 each for weight loss drugs (illegal to import, or use without a face to face prescription; HGC drops) and finally, malware infected botnet Trojans inside zipfiles claiming to be invoices, delivery notices, etc.
Other lesser categories of spam included: Fake Diplomas, Lotteries, African senders, 419 scams, foreign language spam, miscellaneous pharmaceuticals, pirated software, Viagra, known spam domains and subjects, ISO encoded subjects, and my blocked countries filters.
The last major category, the infected zipfiles, are part of a huge attack that has been ongoing for three weeks in a row. Bot Herders, having lost control of millions of zombies, when Microsoft, FireEye, the DOJ and other security research companies decapitated the Bredolab (in October 2010), Coreflood, Rustock, Waledac and other spam-spewing botnets this year, are hard at work rebuilding their armies of robotic malware slaves. Their most successful weapon seems to continue to be exploiting the weakest link in the chain of infection: Human Curiosity. Send out a gazillion spam messages about a pending, or failed delivery. or an alleged speeding ticket, or failure to process an IRS refund or tax form, and thousands of curious, gullible people will open the attached zipfiles to see what the fuss is all about. Poof: they are botted!
More...
This week I made 7 update and/or additions to my custom filters:
Courier Scam #7 (UPS infected attachments),
HTML Spam Tricks,
.Info Images and Links (2 times),
Known Spam Subjects #4,
Software Spam,
Viagra Spam [B]
Don't let your PC become a zombie in a spam, or malware/phishing hosting, or DDoS attack botnet. Delete scam and spam emails on sight, and do not open any attachments unless you are specifically expecting them from the sender of that message - and then, only if you have state of the art, up to date anti virus protection watching as you open email messages.
I use and recommend MailWasher Pro (2011) to screen my incoming POP3 email for spam, scams and virus threats, before downloading anything to my Windows Live Mail email client.
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