We don’t like spam and are thankful that Askimet keeps our blog comments relatively clean.
But that does nothing for the email we get on a daily basis. Word on the street is that there are “at least 956 different ways to spell VIAGRA (e.g., VIAGRA, V1AGRA, V1@GR@, V!AGRA, VIA6RA, etc.).”
Enter Project Honey Pot.
About Project Honeypot
Project Honey Pot is a community of tens of thousands of web and email administrators from more than 170 countries around the world who are working together to track online fraud and abuse. The Project has been online since 2004 and each day receives millions of email and comment spam messages which are catalogued and shared with law enforcement and security partners.
The organization reported today that they captured their 1 billionth spam — a faux message from the US Internal Revenue Service suggesting to the recipient that they are due a tax refund.
Here’s a mind blowing statistic:
Every time Project Honey Pot receives a message we estimate that another 125,000 are sent to real victims. Our billionth message represents approximately 125 trillion spam messages that have been sent since Project Honey Pot started in 2004.
Give their post a read. They have an interesting run down of the the world’s best IT security (Finland), and its worst (take a bow, China). They also give a non-wonky rundown of how spammers actually work.
Well done. And keep up the good work.
