My spam analysis for May 6 - 13, 2012
After taking a month off from publishing my spam statistics, I am resuming it today. I have been watching spam trends during my quiet month and found that the volume of spam is increasing. This, after a year of declining spam volumes.
I have added up all my incoming email and counted those classified as spam, and found that in the last week, my percentage of spam has been almost 40%. During the same period last year, it measured just 30%. This is a 10% increase.
I measure the amounts and types of spam with MailWasher Pro (2012), which compiles very good statistics for its users. If you don't already know about this program, it is a spam filter and email classifier, which sits between your email servers and your email client. It receives either POP3 or IMAP email from your mail servers and applies any filter or blacklist rules you define. I write and publish spam filters for MailWasher Pro and most of them are so reliable that I set them to automatically delete known spam. In case the filters are in error, I am able to restore the wrongly deleted messages from the MailWasher Recycle Bin.
While the volume and percentage of spam has increased over the last 7 days, an interesting development occurred: there was no spam with either malware links or attachments! In the previous weeks there were many such hostile messages, spoofing all manner of known websites and banks. Make no mistake, the malware scams will resume soon. Stay alert, especially if you have Java, Flash, or Adobe Reader installed on your computers or smart phones/tablets.
I always advise my readers to hover over links before clicking on them. Doing this causes the actual URL (web address) to be displayed on the bottom of your browser (Web-mail) or email client (desktop email program). This gives the savvy user a chance to see if the link claiming to lead to Intuit actually goes to a website that has nothing to do with intuit.com, or facebook.com, paypal.com, linkedin.com, etc, etc.
On the other hand, clicking (without hovering first to check it out) on a poisoned link takes you to a compromised website, which uses JavaScript and iframes to redirect you to a Russian malware server, where your computer is attacked for any vulnerable software. If you have any exploitable, unpatched software installed, your computer may be taken over by criminals and drafted into a spam and attack botnet, and have malware installed which steals money from your financial accounts, or extorts money from you to fix non-existent problems.
Let's move on to the spam analysis for the week...
Statistics Overview
Total incoming email: 531
Classified as spam: 210
Percentage classified as spam: ~40%; 30% this time last year
Number of messages classified as spam by my custom filters: 201
Number auto-deleted by my custom blacklist: 7
Number classified as spam by the Bayesian Learning filter: 2
The order of spam categories, according to the highest percentages, is as follows:
Male Enhancement: 55
Fake Pharmacies: 31
Counterfeit Cialis: 18
Counterfeit Watches: 18
Money Mule & work at home scams: 17
Fake Diplomas: 16
Weight Loss scams: 10
Blacklisted: 7
Russian and Ukrainian spam domain links: 6
Fake online Casinos: 5
Russian Dating scams: 2
Nigerian 419 & Lottery scams: 6
Miscellaneous spam: 19
Updates and/or additions to my custom spam filters:
Known Spam Subjects #4,
Male Enhancement [S] (twice),
Money Mule Scam #2 (twice).
Updated and renamed ".RU .UA" Domain Link to "Russian" Domain Link
Additions to my MailWasher Pro Blacklist:
There was 1 false positive last week, which I corrected in my published filters. All other filters behaved as intended. Note, that I now publish three types of spam filters for MailWasher Pro. One type is for the latest 2012 series, in xml format, and two are for the previous series 6.x. One of those filters is set for manual deletions and the other for automatic deletions. You can read all about MailWasher Pro and the filters I write for it, on my MailWasher Pro Custom Filters page.
If you are having trouble caused by excess volumes of spam email, and are not using an effective filter, why not try out MailWasher Pro? It sure works for me!
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