About a week ago, I received an email indicating that the Project Honey Pot had received its 1 billionth spam message.  This is quite incredible.  More importantly, the work they do helps us use our emails with less spam.  As such I just really want to thank the guys at Project Honey Pot.

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU...

Project Honey Pot - What They Do...

Some of the data in the email is quite entertaining as well.  For example, apparently spammers take vacation also.  Spam volume drops significantly on Christmas day.  Read on!

On Wednesday, December 9, 2009 at 06:20 (GMT), Project Honey Pot achieved a milestone: receiving its 1 billionth spam message. The billionth message was an United States Internal Revenue Service phishing scam sent to an email
address that had been harvested more than two years ago. More than just a single spam email, the billionth message represents the collective work of you and tens of thousands of other web and email administrators like you in more than 170 countries around the world. Together we have built Project Honey Pot into the largest community tracking online fraud and abuse.

To celebrate this milestone, we sifted through five years of data to learn more about spam and the spammers who send it. As a small token of thanks for your help, we wanted to share some of our more interesting preliminary findings. Click the following link for the Full Report: http://www.projecthoneypot.org/1_billionth_spam_message_stats.php

Highlights 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
• - And much more.....

We have published it under the Creative Commons Attribution license, so don't hesitate to share anything you find interesting. In the end, we couldn't have gathered this data without you.

Thank you for all your help over the last five years. Here's to wishing you happy holidays and a relatively spam-free New Year.

Sincerely,
The Project Honey Pot Team