Honeypot spam statistics
Around ten months ago, I talked about the effectiveness of the project honeypot blacklisting system on this website.
Recently, they reached the very significant milestone of receiving their 1 billionth spam message. Here's what they've learnt about spammers:
- 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 2.5 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.
Full findings here.
Due to the large volume of spam, comments are disabled. If you have anything relevant to say, you can leave a comment via Twitter, or contact me directly.
About the author
I'm Ivan Lutrov and I'm the owner of Lutrov Interactive. I have 25 years of experience producing interactive work and I create cost effective business websites that are simple, engaging and easy to use. I practice what I preach and I say what I really think, even if it's sometimes not what you want to hear. Subscribe to the Lutrov Interactive feed via RSS and follow me on Twitter.