Changing Face of Spam

 

The graph below shows the types of spam at several dates over the last year.

In that time the number of spam messages per day has increased from under a thousand to well over seven thousand, so all values have been normalised as percentages.


Looking at the various types of categories of spam, you can make a few simple conclusions.

1. Pump and Dump after being consistently over twenty percent has dropped significantly in the last couple of months to less than five. The SEC is clamping down on this fraud and it would seem that many of the crooks in this area have moved on.

2. Drugs, mainly of the erectile disfunction group, have shown an amazing consistency over the last few months and seem to be stuck on about fifty-five percent. A good percentage are from Canada.

3. Bank phishing scams are still with us and after a few months at low levels, they have now returned to higher ones, due to a concerted attack on the Royal Bank of Scotland.

4. Casino spam and mainly for one group operating out of Antigua are showing a steady growth and now make up nearly six percent of the total.

5. Fraud, mainly spurious job opportunities are not as high in the past, but the crooks are consistently thinking up new ideas.

6. Electrical Goods and Computers are a new group that has not been seen before and I suspect the work of one group. Perhaps an ex-Pump and Dump merchant.

7. E-Cards are a curious and dangerous group as they consist of a download that can seriously damage your computer's health. As they are all the same, they are probably one group of crooks, who are responsible for four percent of all the spam I get.

8. Others is not as bad as it seems, as many are returned mail messages, where crooks have used daisy.co.uk addresses to send spam. Perhaps the only good news is that there are only 28 messages in this group advertising pornography.

So you can see that as one avenue closes another opens and the spam continues to rise and overwhelm the Internet.