A visual history of spam (and virus) email

I figure this is redundant, but...

Larry Osterman's WebLog — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 17:18:00 GMT

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

denny — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 15:05:00 GMT

interesting ....

I agree the white band may be related to the can-spam deal. it does fit.

now if I had *MY* spam for the same time you might need to go by a few more disks.... for a while I was running about 4 email servers and web servers and was listed as the contact for them all.... so my volume for a while was *HUGE* I had to tell folks to take the email for the domains to someone else... it was killin me and i was not obliged to take all that work for them ...

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Lorenzo Barbieri — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 15:07:00 GMT

Hey... I've done quite the same thing when I graduated in 1999...
I ported a cluster analysis tool from Fortran to Visual C++ and I tried different sets of data to test it.
One set was related to my emails.
I don't remember what dimensions I checked or what clusters I found, but your post remembered me all that thing! Thanks!

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

James Curran — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 15:10:00 GMT

>> Totals: 237MB of spam in roughly 35,000 messages.

Sheesh.... I did the same thing for ONE MONTH. My totals: 1GB in roughly 116,000 messages.

(But after training using that, SpamBayes works fine!)

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Robert Hahn — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 15:20:00 GMT

Actually, the quiet period is present in the work-email graph - it's harder to see because your 2004 column is as wide as your 2003 column, stretching out the data points horizontally a bit more. But it is there.

chart

chris — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 15:41:00 GMT

what did you make that chart with?

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

SmartAs — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 15:45:00 GMT

Great. Now I know the great majority of spam is between 1.5K and 128K. I'll just eliminate all that to get rid of 90% of the spam. 8v)

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

BillT — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 15:50:00 GMT

I noticed a huge dropoff at one point, also. I associated it with new Comcast procedures to limit outgoing spam, mostly from zombies, I assume.

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Edward — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 16:14:00 GMT

Does anyone have a similar analysis of the subjects of Spam? A few years ago it was all Get-Rich-Quick schemes now its become Medication, Loans, and conterfeit software.

I'd like to see a page similar to the Google Zeitgeist with rising and falling SPAM topics. I thought I'd try and write one myself but I figured someone would already have done it.

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

William — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 16:22:00 GMT

Human brains are the best filters.
http://www.cloudmark.com/products/spamnet/
And the only ones likely to work.

We all bow to Raymond

a little ludwig goes a long way — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 19:41:00 GMT

A visual history of spam (and virus) email -- he is the true king of the geeks....

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Raymond Chen — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 16:42:00 GMT

The trend towards <IMG>-based spam impairs the ability to categorize them by subject matter.

The Comcast shutoff was in March 2004 which doesn't seem to match up with any gaps in the charts.

Another inefficient way of sending documents

Eric Hodel — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 16:48:00 GMT

Scanned images of a Word document printout placed in a word document.

Yes, one was sent to my entire company by upper management.

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Alex — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 16:56:00 GMT

I suspect that the reason that you see spam going away is to increased reliability and use of corporate-level spam filters.

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

David Voss — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 17:02:00 GMT

*bows* I'm not worthy, I'm not worthy...

So how did you come to decide that you would actually save every piece of spam and virus email? For most people they want to dispose of it as quickly as possible rather than archive it, especially as long as you have.

Thanks for sharing this. It was definitely an interesting read!

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Todd Spatafore — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 17:18:00 GMT

It would be interesting to see SPAM flux by hour of day, day of week, and by month of year. Also, it looks like there is a relative dry period at the beginning of 2003 that has almost the same width as the one at the beginning of 2004.

This was very interesting. Thank you for sharing.

Exchange-faq.dk - Din portal til Microsoft Exchange Server information

TrackBack — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 20:36:00 GMT

Exchange-faq.dk - Din portal til Microsoft Exchange Server information

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Jim — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 19:16:00 GMT

>> Perhaps my ISP instituted a filter
>> for a while?

Perhaps it's still there. It's just that spam "evolved" since then, making the filter less effective.

oppressive fork clarinet

jeffdav's WebLog — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 22:32:00 GMT

Are you viewing the spam?

Will Rickards — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 19:36:00 GMT

Are you viewing the spam? Or allowing the images to load?
I'm sure you are smart enough to avoid viewing it or at least having it load the images so that the e-mail address can be verified. I just want to know because I hope it affects these numbers.

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Raymond Chen — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 19:39:00 GMT

I don't view the images or follow any links.

The program that generates the graph is written in perl. There's nothing like generating a bitmap by writing raw binary data.

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Miles Archer — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 20:01:00 GMT

Fascinating stuff. I wonder what it would look like if you graphed # vs time instead of size vs time. Again a semi log scale is probably appropriate.

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Merle — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 21:09:00 GMT

It would be interesting to see spam and virii on separate graphs: it's tricky to tell a blue dot from a {blue dot next to a red dot}.

One of my "filters" was to discard any email >50K. Friends know better than to send me even HTML email, much less attachments. But according to this, I'm not really losing much.

(the main things I saw a drop in were the gigantic virii)

Having your own top level domain would increase your spam tremendously. I get email to accounts that never existed, that nobody has ever used, because about a year ago spammers started emailing [X]@(domain), where [X] is picked out of a dictionary. (for the most part they do them sequentially, so it's easy to catch, but...).

I get 10,000 spams a day on average, and saw a day of 40,000 once. I just sat there clicking on my junk box, watching new messages coming in between every click...

oppressive fork clarinet

jeffdav's WebLog — Fri, 17 Sep 2004 00:38:00 GMT

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Chiascuro — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 23:10:00 GMT

I own a top level domain for my country and get approximately one spam every few days.

I think it's because my domain name is foo.{something}.{countrycode}

I suspect the spammers search for foo in their databases and remove it because so many people use it as a fake address.

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Norman Diamond — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 23:54:00 GMT

Regarding the base note: Your company didn't start filtering spams until late 2003, yet your highest number of spams in one day prior to that was only 67? You must have been doing something in order to get so few, what were you doing?

By the way, around 1997 or 1998 on a mail server I saw logs of spams being sent to addresses that had stopped existing around 1994.

Also: 9/16/2004 4:10 PM Chiascuro
> I suspect the spammers search for foo in
> their databases and remove it because so
> many people use it as a fake address.

No way. Spammers do not care how many bounces they cause, because bounces do not get delivered to spammers, bounces get delivered to other victims.

This is so awesome... Spam graphed by time and size

The Software Engineering Student — Fri, 17 Sep 2004 06:05:00 GMT

Free stuff, Exchange, SMS, SPS, SSL, history of viruses

Windows Server Clustering — Fri, 17 Sep 2004 09:58:00 GMT

Raymond Tracks Spam

protected virtual void jayBlog { — Fri, 17 Sep 2004 12:02:00 GMT

Visual analysis of Spam and Virii

Adam's Mindspace — Fri, 17 Sep 2004 12:12:00 GMT

pedantry alert!

Tom Seddon — Fri, 17 Sep 2004 09:43:00 GMT

English plural of "virus" is "viruses".

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

jafee — Fri, 17 Sep 2004 12:40:00 GMT

I also noticed a similar lull in your work email graph at the end of 2003. I wonder ....

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Jeff — Fri, 17 Sep 2004 13:32:00 GMT

As far as the lull's at the start of 2003 and 2004....maybe even spammers are busy during the holidays.

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

M. Mortazavi — Fri, 17 Sep 2004 17:38:00 GMT

This is very interesting work and the comments that follow are also most interesting. If enough material is collected, this is really publishable work.

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Art Vandelay — Fri, 17 Sep 2004 18:54:00 GMT

Spam filter on mailer server and AV program on computer.

In the last 5 years (since Nov 1999) I have recieved 1 e-mail that contained a virus (which was promptly deleted by my AV program) and spam receipt has typically been 1 to 2 per week, sometimes going 2-3 weeks at a time with none.

I must be doing something wrong.

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

MagicMike — Fri, 17 Sep 2004 20:35:00 GMT

I also receive admin mails for maybe 30+ domains and multiple aliases. Currently we reject those messages that are sent to non-existent addresses. This means that I have received about 10k emails since May 28 only to addresses like webmaster@domain etc. Out of these were less than 2k technical, machine sent legitimate emails and about 50 human sent, legitimate mails.

I still get about 5-10 spams a day to my personal mailbox (only my username or my personal alias), total of 1.5k mails since 1st of Jan. I think this is really acceptable.

Related to our whole corporate mail handling, we have a SpamAssassin based filter in use. In August we received about 1.5k mails classified as spam (5.0 points or more) and 6k mails classified as not spam ((4.9 points or less). I guess we could be even more strict.

Just my 2c :)

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Another Spam Graph - The Impact of Changing Tactic — Sat, 18 Sep 2004 03:19:00 GMT

Here's another graphical take on spam impact - not as far back as this one goes, but looks at my spam volume in terms of message count.

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

KC Lemson — Sat, 18 Sep 2004 06:32:00 GMT

I have a folder where I kept all of the viruses I received from anyone inside the company, but only so that I knew who was stupid, not for analysis. And I haven't gotten one in years.

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Kevin Yeow — Sat, 18 Sep 2004 09:21:00 GMT

Interesting. Definitely informative. I wonder if anyone was able to track spoofing too. Virus, spam, spoofing, phishing - how I wish the internet could be a safer place for real communication and sharing of info.

Nowadays, one has to have a anti-virus protector, spam filters, adware blaster, firewall . . . etc.

Maybe one day all these energies can be generated to productive use instead.

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

James Boyd — Sat, 18 Sep 2004 12:35:00 GMT

The one Virus proof way to check and read all your email is a live Linux CD.
If you use a live linux CD, and go to the mail server, it is impossable to get a virus.

Morten Isaksens blog » A visual history of spam (and virus) email

TrackBack — Sat, 18 Sep 2004 18:27:00 GMT

Morten Isaksens blog » A visual history of spam (and virus) email

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Raymond Chen — Sat, 18 Sep 2004 16:49:00 GMT

(You can still get a virus if you boot from CD. Of course, if you reboot then it'll be removed from your system. That is, unless it installed itself into your .cshrc...)

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

DJ Wallsauce — Sat, 18 Sep 2004 16:58:00 GMT

Dude you really had nothin' to do for 7 years did you?

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

dj wallsause is funny — Sat, 18 Sep 2004 17:03:00 GMT

hahahahah

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Alex — Sat, 18 Sep 2004 17:05:00 GMT

My single worst spam day was when I received 960 spam messages. They were all the same content with 4 different subject lines. How does that happen?

Blank areas

Joe — Sat, 18 Sep 2004 17:08:00 GMT

Actually there are two vertical blank zones in the graph. They are one year apart, though the second one is much emptier than the first. Anything special about January?

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Marco van de Voort — Sat, 18 Sep 2004 17:09:00 GMT

(guesswork here)

I think it is related to the 2nd address being out of circulation since 1995.

Probably that address is only on address CDs used by relative spammer newbies, that indeed were a bit scared for CAN-SPAM.

The big guns probably have better ways (and filtering) to get live addresses, and your other address is probably included in those?

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Marco van de Voort — Sat, 18 Sep 2004 17:09:00 GMT

A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Shaghaghi.net — Sat, 18 Sep 2004 20:11:00 GMT

A visual history of spam (and virus) email...

Sucker for Visualization : Spam and Virii

maps and legends — Sat, 18 Sep 2004 20:14:00 GMT

I'm a sucker for cool visualizations, and here's another. Raymond Chen has saved every bit of spam / virusmail he's received for the past 7 years and has plotted it all out. I won't steal his thunder by showing the charts here, but it's quite amazing. Seems that spam peaked in 2002. Some great stats: Largest message: 1,406,967 bytes, received January 8, 2004. HTML mail with a lot of text including 41 large images. A slightly smaller version was received...

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Larry Osterman — Sat, 18 Sep 2004 17:20:00 GMT

Congrats, you just hit /. :)

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Dave — Sat, 18 Sep 2004 17:34:00 GMT

Yeah, watch out for your server.

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

William Watson — Sat, 18 Sep 2004 17:38:00 GMT

I can understand why corporate e-mail systems must allow false positives for SPAM. What I DON'T understand is why you continued to see increasing numbers of viruses! Surely any relatively competent anti-virus software could filter those with a high degree of success, whilst leaving the SPAM filters - if any - untouched.

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Raymond Chen — Sat, 18 Sep 2004 17:39:00 GMT

The virus filter removes the payload but leaves the body. So you get messages that say "Please review this document" with no document. I counted those as viruses. I also counted bounces created by viruses as viruses.

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Stephen — Sat, 18 Sep 2004 17:39:00 GMT

Prepare to be /.ed

What made you decide to keep all your spam?

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Raymond Chen — Sat, 18 Sep 2004 17:41:00 GMT

I thought I answered that question in the opening sentence.

Shlashdotted :p

Dominic Pody — Sat, 18 Sep 2004 17:43:00 GMT

Haha, nice. I love the graph.

Oh, and you got Slahdotted :p

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

William Watson — Sat, 18 Sep 2004 18:00:00 GMT

Re: Virii

Makes sense; thanks for the clarification.

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Dylan Smith — Sat, 18 Sep 2004 18:02:00 GMT

The best way of avoiding virus mail is to block Windows executables of any type at the mail server. I started doing this when Swen broke out (I was getting 2-3 Swen worm emails PER MINUTE).

I have never, ever recieved a legitimate Windows executable in email.

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Cornflake — Sat, 18 Sep 2004 18:02:00 GMT

It's going down!

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Frances — Sat, 18 Sep 2004 18:07:00 GMT

my favourite email - the no msg and %BR were html links
From: "%F_N %L_N" <DamahnKinkaid@peoplepc.com>
To: *@*.com
Subject: Re: my favorite
Date: Sun, 29 Aug 2004 17:19:57 +0200
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/html;
charset="iso-8859-1"
Return-Path: DamahnKinkaid@peoplepc.com
X-OriginalArrivalTime: 29 Aug 2004 14:09:09.0812 (UTC) FILETIME=[C0F41740:01C48DD1]

%RND_ITEM_PROP %BR

%BR %BR no msg
%RND_PHRASE

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Peter da Silva — Sat, 18 Sep 2004 19:01:00 GMT

It looks like your spam load took a hit in 1998. I haven't ever seen my own spam load on any of my accounts go down unless I'd actually done something to make it happen. Are you sure there wasn't some kind of change that year? You say there was no filtering... did you perhaps stop using your email address as widely during 1998?

My own experience is that spam has been exponentially increasing for at least a decade. There hasn't been any point where I would say it really took off... the graphs I did always showed a big take-off in the past couple of years but that's typical of exponential curves. Back in 2000 (when I quit trying to report it and started filtering myself) it was about 300 MB a month.

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Paul Wouters — Sat, 18 Sep 2004 19:23:00 GMT

I don't agree with the comment "spam took off in 2002". Spam has, since I started meassuring it in 1997, been roughly exponential.

See <A HREF=http://www.xtdnet.nl/paul/spam/>my graphs</A> though I should update them for the last year.

Paul

Spam and Virii: A Visual History

datacloud — Sat, 18 Sep 2004 22:33:00 GMT

Raymond Chen at Microsoft has kept every piece of spam and email-based virus he’s received since April, 1997. Includes interesting charts and analysis. [via Slashdot]...

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Fred — Sat, 18 Sep 2004 20:08:00 GMT

I started to do this in 2001 but got bored in about 3 monthes. http://96trees.com/spam/spam.html

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

osssuporter — Sat, 18 Sep 2004 20:18:00 GMT

Yeah I had like a gig of spam and viruses/month, for viruses my mail server took care of it (it sends a report every month on how many things it blocked), but the spam kept coming so I looked into something other than Outlook, thunderbird and the Bat! became my choices, chose thunderbird , took it about 2 months to learn to guard against all of my spam after that periode nothing but ham. (it lets couple of spam go through, only saw false positives in the beginning).

Couple of questions for the author, I am assuming this is not your primary email addy, when did you open up this account? and how much spam do you get in your primary accont? (assuming you protect it not give out in websites, not give it to stupid people etc.)

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

David Turnbull — Sat, 18 Sep 2004 20:33:00 GMT

http://yossman.net/~dave/spam.png

Here's a graph of my 5-6 email addresses, starting October last year.
The size has been divided by 10 to fit with the messages, ie, size of 600 is 6000kb.

Interesting to see when huge virus spam started becoming common.

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Raymond Chen — Sat, 18 Sep 2004 20:35:00 GMT

I'm not sure what you mean by "this" account since there are two accounts in this article.

Unsubstantiated Gap Speculation

abb3w — Sat, 18 Sep 2004 21:04:00 GMT

There appears to be a fainter "lull" at the start of 2003, as well as 2004, as others have noted. I would speculate (on no evidence whatsoever) that this is caused by the number of virus-laden zombies being taken off-line and replaced at Christmastime with new uninfected machines-- usually with 30/60/90 day free trials of an anti-virus solution installed.

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Simpleton Jones — Sat, 18 Sep 2004 21:14:00 GMT

The dropoff in January (it's present on all graphs) could be attributed to simple business logic - they're working their butts off in the months before (retail season), and take a vacation in January, since no one is really going to buy much in that month anyways.

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Miryth — Sat, 18 Sep 2004 21:31:00 GMT

Nice one dave, you graphed it in the two colors I can't tell apart due to colorblindness ;p

Tracking spam... lots of spam

spamblogging — Sun, 19 Sep 2004 00:35:00 GMT

Internet week has an article up on a Microsoft employee that has kept all of his spam over the years. Microsoft employee Raymond Chen has compiled unique evidence of the explosion of spam: he's saved every spam message and virus-laden...

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Sven — Sat, 18 Sep 2004 22:15:00 GMT

Great article, thanks.

> Now I know the great majority of spam is between 1.5K and 128K. I'll just eliminate all that to get rid of 90% of the spam

Sounds great but that won't work. At least if everyone is doing that. If spamers find out spam mails are getting > 128K.

Types of Spam

Arash Partow — Sat, 18 Sep 2004 22:20:00 GMT

Hello,

I would like to see a group of the all the different types of spam e-mails out there,
something like percentages, how many about viagra, how many about penis enlargements,
how many about mortgages etc.

Also it would be nice to graph these according to time and to also mark important
consumer oriented holidays and see if there is an increase in the increase of certain
types of spam.

There are actually so many different types of analysis that could be done with such
a corpus of e-mail, its just mind-boggling.

Anywayz hope to see those new sets of analysis soon.

Arash Partow

__________________________________________________
Be one who knows what they don't know,
Instead of being one who knows not what they don't know,
Thinking they know everything about all things.
http://www.partow.net

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Jamie — Sat, 18 Sep 2004 22:33:00 GMT

Wow, que interesante.

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Dez Blanchfield — Sat, 18 Sep 2004 23:32:00 GMT

Hmm...

Raymond Chen, you do realise what posting such an interesting read means now don't you?

It means that I now have to re-appraise my apinion of MS Staff!

Ok, so you're not ALL evil.. there, I said it!

;-)

Dez
---
Dez Blanchfield

Dez <at> WebSearch.COM.AU

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Threeboy — Sat, 18 Sep 2004 23:33:00 GMT

I wonder how effective spam is.

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Zack — Sun, 19 Sep 2004 00:26:00 GMT

>I wonder how effective spam is.

Apparently extremely effective. Else the spammers wouldn't keep doing it.

Help!

Minister of finance of Nigeria — Sun, 19 Sep 2004 00:44:00 GMT

Dear Sir,

I am the former minister of finance of Nigeria. Several years ago.....

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

waltonicia — Sun, 19 Sep 2004 00:55:00 GMT

this isnt slashdot folks... now what we need is a graph of the quality of these posts falling as /.ers rise..

Matches my memory

Robert Accettura — Sun, 19 Sep 2004 01:27:00 GMT

So I'm not alone when it started. This matches about when I felt spam increased. And to about the degree.

Very interesting.

Saturday Computer Blogging II

LatinoPundit — Sun, 19 Sep 2004 04:46:00 GMT

An interesting visual history of spam email done by a Microsoft employee who blogs and has kept a record of...

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

KMT — Sun, 19 Sep 2004 02:30:00 GMT

"This particular email address has been inactive since 1995; all the mail it gets is therefore from harvesting done prior to 1995."

Not so....that address has been resold, reused and re-harvested on a continuous basis since it was first nabbed. In spammer's eyes, it is as fresh as any other (validated or not).

I'd like to see that comment removed, lest readers mistrust the entire page. It speaks to the overall logic applied, and in my opinion, undermines same.

Very interesting..

r0ss — Sun, 19 Sep 2004 02:51:00 GMT

Nice work.

Only 19,000 Spams?

Brian B — Sun, 19 Sep 2004 03:36:00 GMT

I'm currently working as the net admin at a recruiter/headhunter outfit. Our central address for resumes must be on every spam list known to mankind, since 76.4 percent of the aproximately 500 messages received by that address every day are spam. Our ORFEE spam filter only lets an average of 6 to 8 through, so it's not too bad. Still annoys the recruiters, though.

Of the others anywhere between 31 to 165 messages per day are viruses. McAfee has only let one through in the six months that I've been there. Of course that one went straight to my boss . . .

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Matt — Sun, 19 Sep 2004 08:13:00 GMT

Your spam can be considered to be statistical random and therefore although unlikely it is not impossible that a lull of increase could happen for no-reason at all. There is a similar "band" (though less well defined but just pre the year line) on the main chart.

If you are sufficiently math-nerdy like me look up a Poisson distribution. (http://mathworld.wolfram.com/PoissonDistribution.html) which if I remember my probability lessons is the model used for analysing such data. I can't remember the method but you can test the anomaly for statistical significance at various confidence levels. (usually 10%, 5% 2.5% levels).

By the way - great chart.

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Raymond Chen — Sun, 19 Sep 2004 08:17:00 GMT

(I never claimed that my chart was statistically significant. Indeed I explicitly disclaimed it!)

Ceklog » Historia Visual del Spam

TrackBack — Sun, 19 Sep 2004 12:38:00 GMT

Ceklog » Historia Visual del Spam

randomwire.com » Spam

TrackBack — Sun, 19 Sep 2004 13:40:00 GMT

randomwire.com » Spam

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Bodhi — Sun, 19 Sep 2004 12:54:00 GMT

AOL Won't Use Microsoft Anti-Spam Standard
Reuters - Thu Sep 16, 4:06 PM ET

Ahhh now I understand why...

;'>

Bodhi

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Raymond Chen — Sun, 19 Sep 2004 17:21:00 GMT

KMT: I don't see your point. Sure, the address has been re-sold and re-distributed many times since then, but it was *harvested* in 1995.

SPAMBORG: He Keeps Seven Years of Spam and Viruses. It's Not a Pretty Picture

American Digest — Sun, 19 Sep 2004 21:02:00 GMT

The SpamBorg -- Click to enlarge The diligent keeper of Oldnewthing has created A visual history of spam (and virus) email , declaring:"I have kept every single piece of spam and virus email since mid-1997. Occasionally, it comes in handy, for example, to add nave Bayesian spam filter to my custom-written email filter. And occasionally I use it to build a chart of spam and virus email." All we can say is, "Kids, don't try this at home."...

A Visual History Of Spam And Viruses

AraBlog {beta} — Sun, 19 Sep 2004 21:20:00 GMT

A Microsoft employee with some extra time and plenty of spam on his hands has decided to graph out all the spam and viruses he's received since 1997. He's only graphing out the spam that makes it through the corporate...

Spam Visualization

Blog — Sun, 19 Sep 2004 23:23:00 GMT

Check out <a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/oldnewthing/archive/2004/09/16/230388.aspx" target="_blank">this chart</a> that plots every single piece of spam and virus email that arrived at this guy's work email address since April 1997. You can really get a sense of how spam has grown starting in about 2002. Remember when it used to be fairly rare? Neither do I.

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

genck — Sun, 19 Sep 2004 22:36:00 GMT

there is one solution to spam, we catch them and send them to guantanamo. president how about a war on spam? :P

or how about spam (the company that makes the product) sues the spammers for the bad name?

lol keep getting spammed!

nice work btw Chen :D

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

BM — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 00:33:00 GMT

As I recall, Jan 2004 was when win98 was supposed to go unsupported so I guess lots of those machines were either traded in or dumped

Spamariffic!

Sharp Tools — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 03:52:00 GMT

An old schoolmate and colleague of mine, Raymond Chen, just put up some nicely interesting data on his weblogs. He apparently carefully saves every piece of spam that makes it through his corporate spamfilters to his account, preserving them much...

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

eCardica.com — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 01:30:00 GMT

Came across your artical in internet week very impress chart. Great idea. Also looks like can-spam is quite things down a bit.

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Amuro — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 01:58:00 GMT

Don't you have anything better to do?

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Raymond Chen — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 02:17:00 GMT

Hm, which is sadder: Somebody who doesn't have anything better to do, or somebody who has nothing better to do than post a comment accusing somebody of having nothing better to do?

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Shannon — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 03:21:00 GMT

I'll agree with Simpleton Jones on the dropoff in Januwary 2004. Maybe you're only on the list of a few high-volume spammers, and they went on vacation in January after the busy holiday season.

Spam, visually

jotsheet — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 07:33:00 GMT

Raymond Chen has an interesting visual for us: every spam and every virus he received between April 22, 1997 and September 10, 2004, graphed by time (x) and size (y). It captures the gut feeling I had—that spam was at its worst in early 2003 when spamming technology outpaced spam filters and the public's knowledge about prevention. On September 11, 2001, I posted a graphic bearing a faint similarity in concept: the traffic on the Internet as panic set in....

Random Intel

technostan — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 07:37:00 GMT

Random Intel Got Game? Who says video games don't mean squat in the real world? According to a new book written by John C. Beck and Mitchell Wade, certain gaming traits are valuable to businesses and these skills may change the world of business. From the book's website: Do any of these Gamer traits sound familiar to you? • If you get there first, you win. • Trial and error is the best strategy, and the fastest way to learn. • Elders and their received wisdom can’t help—they don’t understand even the basics of this new world. • There’s a limited set of tools—but some combination will work. Sounds interesting. I knew those countless hours of Mario would come in handy one day. via Joystiq.com Remembering pi I've always been fascinated with people who can memorize a large amount of information. A recent plus article sheds some light into how people pull off these incredible memory feats. I'm sure everyone has their own technique of memorizing things such as word association or making up a silly rhyme. One thing I didn't know was how smell can be important to memorizing. If you deliberately surround yourself with a particular smell when trying to memorise something, that smell is likely to help trigger the memory later when you need to recall it. The author goes on to say that the part of the brain associated with smell is very close to the part of the brain where long term memories are formed....

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Kenneth Mortensen — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 11:34:00 GMT

My worst spam-days were around the blaster worm played around. I recieved approx 12.000 emails pr. hour during a few days. We contacted hosting-companies where the mails seemed to come from and eventually we got rid of it all.

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Clovis — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 12:24:00 GMT

impressive data collection, very interesting work

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Mat Hall — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 13:17:00 GMT

"Hm, which is sadder: Somebody who doesn't have anything better to do, or somebody who has nothing better to do than post a comment accusing somebody of having nothing better to do?"

To commemorate the fact that we're all nerds, and that the Star Wars box set is out now, I think you should have uttered the immortal line "Who's the more foolish - the fool, or the fool who follows him?"

And although you've sort of explained why you kept them all (training your Bayesian filter) I would have thought that the arms race between spammers and spamees means that last year's spam is no use at all in training your filter. Perhaps you were saving them for old age when you may actually NEED "H3rb4l \/-i-@-g-r-@!!!11!!1!"? :)

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Unknown User — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 15:29:00 GMT

Interesting. I can't say that I've ever really had a problem with spam. In the last four years I've recived a total of 3 spam messages, each one surprised the hell out of me. The latest one which I recived in July of 2003 was rather amusing. Something about breast augmentation. (I'm male.) Though I know quite a few people that complain about spam problems. I would never have expected it to be so bad. The graphs provided do however put everything in perspective. Paranoia pays off after all.

What do you do with spam?

Strang's Blog — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 19:25:00 GMT

The blog “The Old New Thing” has presented stats over all spam and virus e-mails received since 1997. Quite impressive. He must have one heck of a large inbox :)...

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

KC Lemson — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 16:47:00 GMT

Regarding "You can see that in late 2003, the blue dot density diminished considerably. That's when mail administrators found a filter whose false-positive rate was low enough to be acceptable." - that's all thanks to the IMF (http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/downloads/2003/imf/default.asp).

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Michel van Kessel — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 16:50:00 GMT

very intresting! good job! compliments!

DiVERSiONZ — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 23:26:00 GMT

Blogger has kept every single piece of spam and virus email since mid-1997. Why? You ask. He has his reasons

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Don — Tue, 21 Sep 2004 02:15:00 GMT

Interesting. My seldom used work account reallys started to pick up spam inearly 2003, about 6 months after it went more or less inactive, and still gets nearly 90 per day, although is has started to drop a bit. My guess is someone got a copy of the company mail account list. Another company account (different URL) get none, probably due to aggressive filtering. And a homea ccount gets perhaps 15 a day now, up from almost non 6 months ago.

The lull in early 2004 is similar to a somewhat less obvious lull in early 2003. My guess is that the folks buying SPAM services have discoverd that people do not buy much in the month or two after Christmas, so why spend money advertizing via spam that provides minimal return - just spend the winter months in the tropics.

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Reader — Tue, 21 Sep 2004 04:41:00 GMT

Work: Never had any spam. Had a few viruses.
Home: Never had any spam. Never had any viruses.
Girl friend gets spamed for college/financial aid bs. She has @comcast.net.
I use a private mail server.
We really dont have any extra firewalls spamblockers or virus detectors. Although I see tons of this type of software on every windows box I've ever sat down in front of.

May be I'm just not trusting enough. May be I've some intuitive wisdom. May be I'm just repulsive. May be I've got a Mac.

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Wm. Nakia — Tue, 21 Sep 2004 06:30:00 GMT

Its possible that the quiet spot was when we had that worm attack back in jan/feb... I remember there was a panic among a number of big mail servers. I think yahoo automaticly banned anything with a title of "hello". And hotmail was discarding large numbers of leitamit mail in February (they were more than happy with the false-positives being quietly discarded).

Bird's Eye View Blog

TrackBack — Tue, 21 Sep 2004 23:42:00 GMT

Bird's Eye View Blog

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

a_scratch — Wed, 22 Sep 2004 01:22:00 GMT

From those chart i can see that there's more virus and spam during summertime. I m sure that more youngs geeks spare all summer writing viruses! In my time we were playing outside.

Damn I hate those youngsters! But jesus they re wise!

hehe

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Romain — Wed, 22 Sep 2004 12:23:00 GMT

Very impressive and interesting data, we can see clearly the sobig attack and the other events.

A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Primordial Ooze — Wed, 22 Sep 2004 15:23:00 GMT

Raymond Chen has been collecting e-mail for a long time. Microsoft must not be working him hard enough because he was able to create a pretty spectacular graph that maps trends in e-mail SPAM and viruses.Watch as he takes you through the finer features of the map. Very cool....

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Da BArt — Wed, 22 Sep 2004 14:39:00 GMT

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Phil Renouf — Wed, 22 Sep 2004 19:33:00 GMT

You got linked to on Boing Boing:

http://www.boingboing.net/2004/09/22/a_visual_history_of_.html

Someone from the Spam Weblog pointed it out to them, who knew there was a spam weblog? ;)

Spam weblog: http://spam.weblogsinc.com/

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Leo — Wed, 22 Sep 2004 20:13:00 GMT

It would be interesting to compare this analysis to one of your legit emails. If you have an archive of these they would also make your Baysian classification of email into span and non-spam bins better.

A Visual History of Email Spam

Poor Mojo Newswire — Wed, 22 Sep 2004 23:35:00 GMT

A visual history of spam (and virus) email This guy has saved all of his spam and viruses delivered by email. He has also plotted all of them on a chart so you can see the distribution of spam over...

about your inactive account

Ignacio — Wed, 22 Sep 2004 21:03:00 GMT

Hi! Sorry, but coulnd't be your inactive account gets trapped by techniques (like simply trying letter combinations) that don't actually require to read it somewhere?

My gmail account got spammed the minute I got it and nobody had it!

A visual history of spam (and virus) email

/dev/random — Thu, 23 Sep 2004 01:35:00 GMT

A guy from Microsoft has made a cool drawing: Since 1997, he kept all spam/virus received and was able to...

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

chris — Thu, 23 Sep 2004 00:46:00 GMT

What i find interesting is the fact that... Does ANYONE ACTUALLY REACT POSITIVELY TO SPAM? IS IT A MARKETING TOOL FEASIBLE ENOUGH TO JUSTIFY SUCH OVERLOAD? I think not. Spammers obviously work under the deluded notion that a 1% successful reaction will make them money. If they tightened up their systems by hiring enlightened consultants (like me) they'd probably be millionaires by now. :-)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
It is amazing. I sent about 30k spams late last year targeting salespeople - we were selling motivational tapes. We made roughly one sale per 1500 emails. Granted, we went after real estate and insurance agents, but still... I stopped though - bad karma..

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

RaTTy — Thu, 23 Sep 2004 05:39:00 GMT

All I can say is with SPAM, they insult me. I got one the other day that offered to increase my 'little mate' and I am insulted!! WHY WOULD I 'DECREASE' the size of my 'little mate' to a mere 12 - 16 inches????
:-) Another funny brought to you by someone who cares less, and loves (IT) more.

A visual history of spam

Tallies the techno monkey — Thu, 23 Sep 2004 08:44:00 GMT

A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Ernie's 3D Pancakes — Thu, 23 Sep 2004 20:15:00 GMT

A visual history of spam (and virus) email. Edward Tufte would be proud.

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Soonts — Thu, 23 Sep 2004 23:39:00 GMT

Hmm... Very interesting data.
However, don't you noticed that spam's moving from e-mails to search engines, instant messengerz and GSM phones (SMS)? :-(

P.S. The article was translated in Russian & linked by xakep.ru: http://www.xakep.ru/post/23943/default.asp (sorry, Russian only)

Free stuff, Exchange, SMS, SPS, SSL, history of viruses

Windows Server Clustering — Fri, 24 Sep 2004 04:28:00 GMT

Massor av skrp

Det perfekta tomrummet — Fri, 24 Sep 2004 10:05:00 GMT

A visual history of spam. Vore intressant att se den hr mngden mailtexter (en korpus s god som ngon) underskas...

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Sabin — Fri, 24 Sep 2004 11:26:00 GMT

Very cool. I like it.

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

El Kel — Fri, 24 Sep 2004 11:33:00 GMT

Fascinating! Well done on collating this data - although it looks scary when represented on a graph like that!

Re spam messages in general: I love it when spammers think I need help to increase the size of my "little mate" (great euphemism!) - no thanks, being female I don't really have the equipment to take them up on the offer :-)

Weirdest spams I've ever had: people trying to sell me septic tanks. Heaven knows why. . .

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Jason — Fri, 24 Sep 2004 13:29:00 GMT

UNSUBSCRIBE

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

default. — Fri, 24 Sep 2004 21:08:00 GMT

why are so many comments, copied and pasted from various articles, describing your work ?

could almost say, your getting spammed...

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Norman Diamond — Sat, 25 Sep 2004 00:22:00 GMT

9/23/2004 4:39 PM Soonts

> However, don't you noticed that spam's
> moving from e-mails to search engines,
> instant messengerz and GSM phones (SMS)? :-(

Well, cell phones have been getting e-mail spams for more than 5 years now. A few years ago it got to the point where phone companies had to let recipients preview somewhere around the first 100 characters of an incoming message for free before deciding whether to download the entire message.

Among all the methods of spamming by which spammers make recipients pay the costs of delivery, I can only think of two which aren't used. One is physical postage-due postal mail. The other is collect calls. Anyone know why these two kinds of spams don't exist?

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Tolik — Sun, 26 Sep 2004 08:52:00 GMT

Вот так подумать: ничего себе спамеры хуярят.

Spizam

MahiX2 — Mon, 27 Sep 2004 10:49:00 GMT

I thought I had it bad when it came to spam. I actively send/receive e-mail through 8 e-mail addresses, and on a daily basis is it pretty common to have somewhere in the neighborhood of 125 spam messages per day...

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Walter — Mon, 27 Sep 2004 18:48:00 GMT

Norman Diamond asks, "Anyone know why these two kinds of spams don't exist?"

Because the Postal Service stopped delivering postage-due mail and recipients have an opportunity to decline collect calls. (For the moment...)

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Russell — Tue, 28 Sep 2004 12:23:00 GMT

And it used to be that spam said something, whether it was some Nigerian fraudster or I could have a 4 metre penis or whatever ~ I've noticed new emails that are just random combos of words. So what the heck's the point ?? Dumb

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Don — Thu, 30 Sep 2004 12:31:00 GMT

Random combos of words - maybe to get search engine hits?

Spam lul

Not-the-same-Don — Sat, 02 Oct 2004 19:36:00 GMT

I agree with abb3w. People get new computers at Xmas with free trial period for Norton. They figure out Norton is making the whole computer slower than molasses and give up on virus protection entirely.

Show Tunes and Love Stories

MeriBlog : Meri Williams' Weblog — Thu, 07 Oct 2004 12:02:00 GMT

Plotting spam. In a graph way, rather than a muha-ha-ha way God vs Bush, the evidence at last ;-) Absolutely hilarious account of a gay guy on the subway being preached at and deciding to sing showtunes at the...

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

James — Sun, 10 Oct 2004 16:25:00 GMT

People Pc has a spam blocker...I think.

re: A visual history of spam (and virus) email

Andrew — Tue, 12 Oct 2004 02:09:00 GMT

Fascinating ... well done Raymond

aquafusion - home

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aquafusion - home

circle.ch / moblog

TrackBack — Sun, 17 Oct 2004 22:49:00 GMT

circle.ch / moblog

Ryanware Blog » I guess I should keep spam after all

TrackBack — Thu, 18 Nov 2004 08:16:00 GMT

Ryanware Blog » I guess I should keep spam after all

XTremeBlog » Graphical Spam

TrackBack — Sat, 20 Nov 2004 21:33:00 GMT

XTremeBlog » Graphical Spam

A visual history of spam

grockwel: Research Notes — Mon, 29 Nov 2004 17:38:00 GMT

A visual history of spam (and virus) email charts spam (and virus laden e-mail) since 1997 when the author started collecting all spam (now that takes dedication!) As his/her graph shows spam took off in 2002 - I wonder what...

A visual history of spam (and virus) email

mbachina's Weblog — Tue, 28 Dec 2004 21:20:00 GMT

A visual history of spam (and virus) email and MBA funs!"> MBA funs!"> MBA funs!"> MBA funs!"> MBA funs!"> MBA funs!"> MBA funs!"> MBA .

Interting !~

j. scott kosoy » Blog Archive » Popular

TrackBack — Mon, 07 Feb 2005 18:46:00 GMT

j. scott kosoy » Blog Archive » Popular

Quick Spam Fact

Scott on Writing — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 22:41:00 GMT

Victor Boctor's Blog - A visual history of spam from 1997 to 2004

TrackBack — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 11:46:00 GMT

Victor Boctor's Blog - A visual history of spam from 1997 to 2004

peter.smoothouse.com » Blog Archive » Visual history of spam and viruses

peter.smoothouse.com » Blog Archive » Visual history of spam and viruses — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 02:14:40 GMT

PingBack from http://peter.smoothouse.com/2004/09/17/visual-history-of-spam-and-viruses/

Andrew Ferrier’s Blog » Blog Archive » Spam and OCR

Andrew Ferrier’s Blog » Blog Archive » Spam and OCR — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 17:13:12 GMT

PingBack from http://www.new-destiny.co.uk/andrew/blog/2006/11/10/spam-and-ocr/