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.

Honeypot statistics

Full findings here.

Due to the large volume of spam, comments are disabled. If you have anything to say, please feel free to contact me directly.

About the author

Ivan's mugshotIvan Lutrov is the owner of Lutrov Interactive. He creates cost effective business websites that are simple, engaging and very easy to use. When not busy working on client and personal projects, he's into photography, fishing, cricket, tennis, music from the 70s, cooking, good wine, and apparently knows "way too much" about movies. He tells it like it is, whether you like it or not. Subscribe to the Lutrov Interactive feed via RSS and follow Ivan on Twitter.