Spam and email threat analysis for the week ending Oct 23, 2011
Spam is definitely increasing, compared to one month ago. For the last month it hovered around the 40% level. Now, it it approaching 50% of my incoming email. This may not jive with your figures, but my amount of good mail is fairly consistent, so my spam percentages are measurable.
Last summer saw spam levels drop way down, but I am not surprised at this constant increase. New spammers are being recruited and my guess is that the spam class of 2011 has graduated. These fools pay to get into the spam game, hoping to find enough suckers to make a big profit. Spammers are paid for leads, sales, credit card number theft and computer infections.
The biggest categories have not changed much over the last few years. I saw a lot of junk mail for Fake pharmaceuticals, male enhancement pills, weight loss capsules, pirated software, fake diplomas and some Nigerian 419 and lottery scams. What is interesting is the resurgence of Russian Bride dating scams.
The worst threats delivered via email were ACH fraud scams, containing links leading to infection of computers. The predominant infection from following the links in these scams is the Zbot, a.k.a Zeus Trojan, plus a Botnet installer. The Zeus hides and watches for you to login to your financial institution, then steals your credentials and money. it is also used to commit identity theft. I have a custom spam filter that blocks ACH scams.
Almost all of the spam I received last week had links to Russian or Ukrainian domains. They don't even try to cloak the links. Lax enforcement in Russia and The Ukraine makes it relatively easy for counterfeiters, fake pharmacies and software pirates to conduct illegal or shady businesses, without much fear of arrest. There are some high level arrests, now and then, but they are just the tip of the iceberg. There are more Russian spammers and Bot-Masters than their police can investigate. For every top spammer busted, five more seem to take his place.
Let's look at my spam statistics for the week ending Oct 23, 2011, as obtained from my anti-spam program: MailWasher Pro.
During the last week I received about 520 email messages, to all of my accounts. Of those, 250 were classified as spam by MailWasher Pro. That is about 48%.
Here are the categories of spam as classified by my custom spam filters.
Blacklisted senders, from my own blacklist: 17.05%
Ukrainian Spam Domain Links: 16.59%
Male Enhancement: 16.59%
Weight Loss Pills (HCG): 12.90%
Russian Spam Domain Links (.RU): 8.29%
Counterfeit Watches: 7.83%
Cialis: 6.91%
Other misc filters: 5.99%
Russian Dating Scams: 3.23%
Pirated Software: 1.84%
Fake Diplomas: 1.38%
Viagra: 1.38%
The above stats were derived from MailWasher Pro and most were classified by anti-spam filters I write and publish. I frequently update these filters. The following updates were made to my spam filters this week.
Known Spam Domains.
Lottery Scams,
Software Spam [S],
New Filters: ".Info Sender and Link" and ".Info Sender"
I made one addition to my custom blacklist (wildcard expression):
[email protected]
I publish filters for both the old and new versions of MailWasher Pro. However, the new version allows for more lines of conditions than the previous ones. If you use a desktop application to send and receive POP3 email, MailWasher can act as a spam filter before you download email to your email client. You can learn more about the program, download a trial version, or purchase a subscription, at the MailWasher Pro website.
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