I received an excellent study today from the folks at Project Honey Pot about Spam.
Project Honey Pot was created in 2004 by Unspam Technologies, Inc and they have built a community of tens of thousands of web and email administrators in more than 170 countries around the world to help track online fraud and abuse. They also work with law enforcement authorities to track down and prosecute spammers. Recently, they received their 1 Billionth Spam message to one of their trap addresses and to commemorate this milestone they decided to release the data they have accrued over the last 5 years.
There are many fascinating things in this study, for example.. Did you know Monday is the busiest day for Spam and Saturday is the slowest? Assuming the average size requirement for a spam email is 4KB, over the last 5 years the total storage requirement imposed on the Internet by just the spammers sending the top-20 spam campaigns was over 2.5 petabytes! If you don’t know what a petabyte is, it’s BIG (roughly 2.6 million Gigabytes). Lastly, it’s interesting to note that in 2008 there were virtually no Facebook phishing messages, but today Facebook is the second most phished organization in the world and predicted to be #1 in 2010.
For the complete study, click here.
Project Honey Pot is still a little behind McDonald’s, who apparently served their 1 Billionth hamburger back in 1963 and although the menu has changed a bit, today’s estimate has them well over 100 billion! Let’s hope Project Honey Pot is successful and we don’t see the same kind of growth with spam!
Bye for now and Happy Holidays,
Kevin
