Spam and email threat analysis for the week ending Nov 27, 2011
For the fourth week in a row my spam volume and percentage has dropped, this time by 6% from the previous week, down to 24%. Malware bearing emails were completely gone this week.
The top category of spam last week was Russian Bride dating scams. It's hard to believe that anybody in an English speaking country would fall prey to the ridiculous and poorly worded messages sent by Russian criminals posing as prospective dating partners for Americans or Canadians. The entire purpose of these scams is to develop a relationship, then exploit it for monetary gain. It is an easy way for cyber criminals tpo obtain your credit card details and sell them on Russian "carder" forums.
Aside from the Russian Bride scams, the other significant categories of spam were for pirated software, hosted on Ukrainian domains, fake pharmaceuticals and male enhancement pills, fake diplomas, counterfeit watches and illicit weight loss drugs.
The following are the categories of spam, by percentage, from November 21 through 27, 2011, as obtained from my anti-spam program: MailWasher Pro.
During the last week I received 411 email messages, to all of my accounts. Of those, 100 were classified as spam by MailWasher Pro, which is 24% spam. My custom Blacklist auto-deleted 10 spam messages and 7 more were deleted by the DNS Blacklists built into MailWasher Pro. My personal spam filters accounted for 83 and I reported 14 spam messages to SpamCop.
Here are the categories of spam as classified by my custom spam filters.
Russian Bride Dating Scams: 13.00%
Other, miscellaneous categories: 12.00%
Blacklisted senders, from my own blacklist: 10.00%
Ukrainian Spam Domain Links (.com.ua) (all pirated software): 9.00%
Counterfeit Replica Watches: 8.00%
Pharmaceuticals: 7.00%
DNS Blacklists of spam servers: 7.00%
Male Enhancement: 7.00%
Fake Diplomas: 7.00%
Russian (.RU) spam domain links: 6%
Counterfeit Cialis: 5.00%
Weight Loss scams (HCG): 5.00%
Counterfeit Name Brand Goods: 4.00%
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.
Casino Spam,
Known Spam [From] (Rock Cruit Management Money Mule job scams),
Male Enhancement [S]
Misspelled Viagra,
I made 0 additions to my custom blacklist (individual email addresses and wildcard Regular Expressions):
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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