Spam statistics for 2009

Spam is the abuse of electronic messaging systems (including most broadcast media, digital delivery systems) to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately.

In layman’s terms and for email users out there – basically a pain in the arse!

Types of Spam

Wikipedia classifies spam as follows:

• E-mail spam
• Instant Messaging Spam
• Newsgroup spam and forum spam
• Blog, wiki, and guestbook spam
• Mobile phone spam
• Online game messaging spam
• Spam targeting search engines
• Spam targeting video sharing sites

Geographical origins of spam

A 2009 Cisco Systems report lists the origin of spam by country as follows:
(trillions of spam messages per year)

1. Brazil: 7.7;
2. USA: 6.6;
3. India: 3.6;
4. South Korea: 3.1;
5. Turkey: 2.6;
6. Vietnam: 2.5;
7. China: 2.4;
8. Poland: 2.4;
9. Russia: 2.3;
10. Argentina: 1.5.

General costs of spam

• Overhead: The costs and overhead of electronic spamming include bandwidth, developing or acquiring an email/wiki/blog spam tool, taking over or acquiring a host/zombie, etc.
• Transaction cost: The incremental cost of contacting each additional recipient once a method of spamming is constructed, multiplied by the number of recipients.
• Risks: Chance and severity of legal and/or public reactions, including damages and punitive damages
• Damage: Impact on the community and/or communication channels being spammed

Worldwide, it is estimated that spam will cost businesses $130 billion; in the U.S. alone, $42 billion. That’s a 30% increase over 2007 estimates, which themselves were a 100% increase over 2005 figures. (Ferris Research)

And along came Project Honey Pot

At its core, Project Honey Pot is a collection of people from around the world working together to track email harvesters and help stop spam. Some of our members run personal blogs that receive only a trickle of web traffic, others manage national ISPs with tens of thousands of subscribers. What is common between them all is that they are doing their part in this fight to protect the Internet.

Highlights from a report published in December 2009 by Project Honey Pot “Our One Billionth Spam Message” include:

- 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.