My end of 2011 spam analysis
Here it is, New Years day, 2012 and I have just analyzed my email statistics for the past 9 days. After being down for months, spam levels have returned to last year's level of 49%, from Dec 23, through Jan 1. Spammers have indeed ended 2011 with a bang!
After some reading from my security sources blogs, I have learned that most of this spam blast over the last week+ was spewed out by one of the few remaining big botnets: the Cutwail Botnet. This botnet, like most of the others already taken down this year, is based in Russia. The Russian Bot Master may have just been fingered by Brian Krebs, in his "Pharma Wars" article posted on Jan 1, 2012.
The top categories of products and services being spammed the most over the last 9 days were for casinos, male enhancement gimmicks and various illicit pharmaceuticals sold from fake Internet pharmacies.
Lesser categories of spam included replica watches, fake diplomas, Russian dating and bride scams, Nigerian 419 scams and a few malware links to Russian exploit kits. I even got some unreadable spam in the Russian language and character set iso-1251.
As for totals, from December 23, 2011, through January 1, 2012, of the 339 messages I received, 169 were classified as spam, equaling 49% of all email for that period. This is exactly the same percentage of spam from the same time period last year.
I obtain my spam statistics from my anti-spam program: MailWasher Pro. This program sits on my desktop and inspects all email before I download it to Windows Live Mail (formerly Outlook Express). MailWasher uses a combination of tactics to determine if any email is spam, then either flags it as spam, for manual review and deletion, or follows my own spam filter rules and deletes it automatically.
I write my own spam filters for MailWasher Pro and publish them on my MailWasher Pro Custom Filters page. Any changes or updates to my filters are noted on that page. The most recent changes this past week were as follows.
Changes or additions to my MailWasher spam filters:
Loans,
URL Shortener spam links
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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