The Spam Cryer

Project Honey Pot Statistics – 1 Billionth Spam Message

Project Honey Pot is the first and only distributed system for identifying spammers and the spambots they use to scrape addresses from your website. You can learn more about them at http://www.ProjectHoneyPot.org.

On Wednesday, December 9, 2009 at 06:20 (GMT), Project Honey Pot achieved a milestone:

It received its 1 billionth spam message. That message was a phishing scam regarding the United States Internal Revenue Service.

It was sent to an email address that had been harvested more than two years ago. More than just a single spam email, the billionth message represents the collective work of you and tens of thousands of other web and email administrators.

To celebrate that milestone, they have gone through 5 years of data to learn more about spammers and what they do. Below are some of their more interesting findings. You can also see the Full Report here.

Some Preliminary Statistics

• Monday is the busiest day of the week for email spam, Saturday is the quietest
• 12:00 (GMT) is the busiest hour of the day for spam, 23:00 (GMT) is the quietest
• Malicious bots have increased at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 378% since Project Honey Pot started
• Over the last five years, you’d have been 9 times more likely to get a phishing message for Chase Bank than Bank of America, however Facebook is rapidly becoming the most phished organization online
• Finland has some of the best computer security in the world, China some of the worst
• It takes the average spammer 2 and a half weeks from when they first harvest your email address to when they send you your first spam message, but that’s twice as fast as they were five years ago
• Every time your email address is harvested from a website, you can expect to receive more than 850 spam messages
• Spammers take holidays too: spam volumes drop nearly 21% on Christmas Day and 32% on New Year’s Day

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Entry Filed under: Anti-Spam,Bulletins,CudaMail,Phishing