Project Honey Pot: hitting the email spammers

Posted on | December 15, 2009 | 2 Comments

…..is the first and only distributed system for identifying spammers and the spambots they use to scrape addresses from your website.

The project has thousands of members around the world working together to track and stop email harvesters. All you have to do is install the Honey Pot software somewhere on your website – I have it installed on my blog – and Honey Pot does the rest.

The project recently received its billionth spam message, harvested from tens of thousands of participants in 170 countries around the world. The message, pictured here, was a United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS) phishing scam. The spam email was sent by a bot running on a compromised machine in India (122.167.68.1). The spamtrap address to which the message was sent was originally harvested on November 4, 2007 by a particularly nasty harvester (74.53.249.34) that is responsible for 53,022,293 other spam messages that have been received by Project Honey Pot.

On the basis of this vast collection of data, Honey Pot has come up with some stats and trends (which you can share, as it is published under a CC licence):

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 there’s much more – read it on the Project Honey Pot site.

Technorati Tags: project honey pot, email spam, spambots, email harvesting

Category: internet, privacy, security

Comments

2 Responses to “Project Honey Pot: hitting the email spammers”

Twitter Trackbacks for Project Honey Pot: hitting the email spammers : John Connell: The Blog [johnconnell.co.uk] on Topsy.com
December 15th, 2009 @ 4:24 pm

[...] Project Honey Pot: hitting the email spammers : John Connell: The Blog http://www.johnconnell.co.uk/blog/?p=2337 – view page – cached …..is the first and only distributed system for identifying spammers and the spambots they use to scrape addresses from your website. [...]
Anthony
December 15th, 2009 @ 8:42 pm

For someone that works in the school administration side of things, this poses an interesting dilemma – do we publish staff email addresses on the website? If we publish, then we will be spammed; if we don’t publish we have complaints from the wider community.