One Week Only: A Spam Reprieve
Here's a milestone perhaps better left unachieved: Project Honey Pot, a great open-source, anti-spam organization, just received its 1 billionth spam message (yes, folks, B as in billion, or 1,000 x 1 million).
Since its establishment in 2004, Project Honey Pot has been collecting and collating spam messages from its community of like-minded Internet users in an effort to clean up email abuses and online fraud. Its findings are shared with law enforcement, security professionals, researchers, and, perhaps most importantly, with owners of targeted Websites.
Speaking as a researcher, I find Project Honey Pot to be an invaluable source of information for serious opponents of Internet abuses; the majority of its services are free to use, providing an excellent example of a successful and useful community-based project.
Data and statistics are freely available on the Honey Pot Website, and to mark the billionth-spam milestone, project researchers decided to share some of their findings and trends from the last five years of spam gathering.
One interesting piece of anecdotal data is the 21 percent drop in spam on Christmas Day and an even greater decline of 32 percent on New Year’s Day. Either the spammers themselves are in holiday mode or, cynically, they find little financial gain in spamming while the majority of us are celebrating.
Other spam trends: Mondays generate the greatest spam traffic while Saturday spam is significantly lower -- only 60 percent of the peak weekday high. So some spammers also take weekends off.
Honey Pot receiving its billionth spam message also equates to around 125 trillion spam messages being sent worldwide since 2004; that's about 125,000 messages sent to specific targets for every spam message received in the Honey Pot. This is a truly staggering statistic, but, as always in the case of fraud, real victims falling prey to the criminals in these kinds of numbers is perhaps even more breathtaking.
There are many facets to the damage caused by such high levels of illegal Internet traffic. Honey Pot estimates that in terms of space taken up by spammers alone -- and their figures are only based on the top 20 spam campaigns since 2004 (e.g., pharmaceuticals, Internal Revenue Service, etc.) -- more than 2.5 petabytes of storage space has been wasted, a number that is almost unimaginable.
A few spam trends from 2009 expected to continue in 2010:
- JP Morgan Chase is the No. 1 organization for spam topics
- Facebook is the second most spammed topic, projected to overtake JP Morgan in the new year
- Western Union is the third most commonly spammed topic
- Comment spam, i.e., adding spamming links to authentic blogs or specifically created blogs, has increased significantly over the last two years, a trend that is likely to continue as an increasing online threat
I believe we have much to thank Project Honey Pot for, and on everyone's behalf, I wish the Project a quiet holiday with continued success throughout 2010 and beyond.
