Spam percentage continues to increase in 1st week of 2012
For the second week in a row, my email spam percentage has exceeded the amounts recorded during the last quarter of 2011. At 39% it is 7% higher than the same period last year. I will review the various percentages of spam by category, as obtained from my anti-spam program, MailWasher Pro.
For the last couple of weeks there has been a huge amount of spam for the ClubVIP Casino. The links in the email messages spamvertising this currently Romanian based casino use various domain names, all of which redirect to a server running on the Russian Nginx software. When a victim is enticed to click on a link to this casino, rather than arriving at an actual online casino (currently hosted at 89.136.223.126), all they see is an image that is a clickable link to a suspicious file download, currently named SetupClubVIP.exe. This file hooks into the Windows Kernel file, Kernel32.dll, where it can do whatever evil it was designed to do. I tried to have it analyzed at VirusTotal, but the Romanian server is blocking their efforts to download that file.
I would advise anybody who asks my opinion to stay away from this type of scam. Do not download suspicious files to your computer to play any online games. Above all else, make sure you have the very latest and up-to-date anti-malware program installed, to protect your PC, just in case you slip up.
Now, on to the percentages of spam by category, for the week ending January 8, 2012.
The following categories and percentages of spam were obtained from the Statistics readout from the anti-spam program, MailWasher Pro. I write and publish custom MailWasher spam filters that detect and flag, or auto-delete any email spam matching the criteria in my spam filter rules.
Percentage classified as spam: 39%; down 10% from last week, but way up from December
Number of messages classified as spam: 148
Number classified by my custom spam filters: 139
Number and percentage of spam according to my custom blacklist: 7
Number classified as spam according to DNS Blocklists (SpamCop, Spamhaus, etc): 2
Number of spam messages seen, reported to SpamCop & manually deleted: 7
The order of spam according to the highest percentages, is as follows:
Casino Spam: 31.08%
Pharmaceuticals (other than Cialis or Viagra): 19.59%
Diploma (fake documents) Spam: 10.81%
Male Enhancement scams: 7.43%
Cialis (counterfeit): 6.46%
Blacklisted by my custom blacklist: 4.73%
Russian Brides and Dating Scams: 4.05%
Counterfeit/Replica Watches: 4.05%
Other filters with small percentages: 3.38%
Viagra (counterfeit): 2.70%
Russian or Ukrainian Domain links: 2.70%
419 (Nigerian) Scams: 1.35%
DNS Blacklists: 1.35%
Changes or additions to my custom MailWasher filters:
Nigerian 419 Scam #3
Pump and Dump Scam
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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