Project Honeypot spam report
The unsung heroes at Project Honeypot have just released a short analysis of spam traffic observed over the past five years.
The report 1 Billion Spammers Served “celebrates” the project receiving it’s one billionth spam message in it’s worldwide network of spam traps. Some salient points:
- Number of bots has quadrupled each year with nearly 400,000 bots active on any given day.
- Most spammers still seem to be in the United States (as opposed to where it’s actually sent from, eg. China)
- Phishing spam most often claim financial institutions as the fictitious origin, followed by Facebook.
- Comment spam (e.g. on blogs) is increasing, but bots are as widely used (yet) to post comment spam.
The full report is here.
Consider joining the project. They offer some useful services: an HTTP blacklist to reduce address harvesting from your sites, an IP monitor service to alert you of suspicious activity form your netblocks (which I wrote about before), and real-time spam feeds to tune your filters. You can help the project via direct donations, installing a honeypot or donating an MX record to catch spammer scum yourself.