Spam and email threat analysis for the week ending Nov 6, 2011
This week, I saw a significant, 22% drop in the amount of email spam from the week before. The overall amount of spam was also down from the previous week, as were the number of threats carried in email messages.
While most of last week's spam was for the usual pharmaceuticals, male enhancement, Russian brides, pirated software, fake diplomas and Nigerian 419 scams, there was a fair amount of of security threats present in two major categories: ACH fraud and Money Mule job scams.
The ACH scams are old hat now and contain links to Trojan exploit servers in Russia, using a recurring theme about a cancelled money transfer from your bank to another un-named bank. The devil is definitely in the details for those scammed into clicking on the link in those messages. Fortunately, there weren't as many as there were a week or two ago. Read my blog article about how to block the fake ACH notices.
I just wrote an article two nights ago (Nov 5, 2011), about the Money Mule job scams making the rounds. The email spam blast that is continuing to come in all have the same body text as the one I quoted in that article. Please read the article if you need to verify that a job offer you got in your inbox is a Russian Money Mule or Reshipping scam. I don't want any of my readers falling victim to a money laundering or stolen goods trafficking scam.
Without any further ado, here are the categories of spam, by percentage, from October 30 through November 5, 2011, as obtained from my anti-spam program: MailWasher Pro.
During the last week I received about 450 email messages, to all of my accounts. Of those, 170 were classified as spam by MailWasher Pro. That is about 38%. My custom Blacklist did extremely well in blocking all manner of spam and scams sent from domains on my blacklist.
Here are the categories of spam as classified by my custom spam filters.
Ukrainian Spam Domain Links (.com.ua): 22.27%
Blacklisted senders, from my own blacklist: 13.74%
Male Enhancement: 10.43%
Russian Bride Dating Scams: 9.95%
Other, miscellaneous categories: 9.48
Counterfeit Watches: 8.53%
Money Mule job scams: 6.64%
Fake Diplomas: 4.74%
Pharmaceuticals: 4.27%
Cialis: 3.79%
Viagra: 3.79%
Pirated Software: 2.37%
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.
Courier Scam #4,
Money Mule Scam,
Nigerian 419 Scam #3,
Work At Home Scam #1.
Work At Home Scams split into 2 filters, for version 6.x.
New Filter: Wire Transfer Scam
I made no additions to my custom blacklist (wildcard expression):
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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