Project Honey Pot Spam Data

[Mimi]

I thought you computer geeks, administrators and Joe Public would enjoy seeing this information from Project Honey Pot, a huge spam data gathering group.

Dear Sybil:

On Wednesday, December 9, 2009 at 06:20 (GMT), Project Honey Pot achieved a
milestone: receiving its 1 billionth spam message. The billionth message was
an United States Internal Revenue Service phishing scam 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 like you in
more than 170 countries around the world. Together we have built Project
Honey Pot into the largest community tracking online fraud and abuse.

To celebrate this milestone, we sifted through five years of data to learn
more about spam and the spammers who send it. As a small token of thanks for
your help, we wanted to share some of our more interesting preliminary
findings. Click the following link for the Full Report:

http://www.projecthoneypot.org/1_billionth_spam_message_stats.php

Highlights include:

- 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
- And much more.....

We have published it under the Creative Commons Attribution license, so
don't hesitate to share anything you find interesting. In the end, we
couldn't have gathered this data without you.

Thank you for all your help over the last five years. Here's to wishing you
happy holidays and a relatively spam-free New Year.

Sincerely,
The Project Honey Pot Team

[Richard Myers]

Thank you for sharing that update, Sister Sybil.

Our members might appreciate knowing that we have taken a number of precautions to protect their privacy. Sister Sybil actively bans known spammers from membership here at TRO. We occasionally mistake a good guy for a buy guy. For this we apologize. But, the good side is that we have not been subjected to the nasty work of the spammers. Project Honeypot is a main source of information as to who are the "spammers". It has been very helpful to us.

We also do not broadcast our members e-mail addresses. They are hidden so as to keep them from the spammers eyes. And as an added protection the private information received for our full members is not part of our online registration. Lastly, we have turned off automatic registrations. That increases our work greatly in that we hand register all requests. This involves some personal attention prior to even partial registration. It seems to be working quite well.

We appreciate your patience in the registration process as we continue to provide a safe place on the net to fellowship with fellow believers.