Tuesday, December 15, 2009

1 Billionth served....

Project "Honey Pot" is an anti-spam organization that I signed up with last year. People like me who have websites contribute to the "Honey Pot" by placing useless email addresses on our websites. These allow criminals to "harvest" these addresses with their computer "Bots" and so become part of a spammers hit list. What the bad guys don't know is that the future spam replies to these addresses go to the "Honey Pot" folks who then track and keep track of them.

I received an email this morning from them saying they had received their one billionth spam reply. They offer up the interesting spam stats below and you can see the entire stat sheet at: Honey Pot Stats Take a look, some very interesting findings.

- 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