On Wednesday, December 9, 2009 at 06:20 (GMT) Project Honey Pot received its billionth email spam message.
[...]
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.
At this milestone, we wanted to take a second to report some of our findings. Our goal is not to rehash the same old insights but instead to give a new picture that only looking at five years and a billion data points can produce.
[...]
Rather than sending spam directly, spammers primarily use "bot" machines in order to effectively launder their identities. These bots are PCs that have been compromised by a virus and whose owner usually does not know they are being used to send spam. The process is not unlike the stereotypical scene in a movie where the villain keeps his phone call from being traced by relaying it through a number of connections. Similarly, spammers' use of bots can make their messages look like they are coming from somewhere completely different than their actual location. As a result, lists of spam origin countries tell you very little about where the spammers are actually located.
On the other hand, they can help provide insight into a country's security policies because they give evidence on the number of bots operating within a country's borders. Since every country will have a different number of PCs, to make this number comparable we needed to create a ratio. We decided to look at the number of compromised machines operating within the country divided by the number of security professionals operating in the country. This gives us a relative IT security score. As a proxy for the number of security professionals we used members in Project Honey Pot. Here are the results:
Worst IT Security
#1 China
#2 Azerbaijan
#3 South Korea
#4 Colombia
#5 Macedonia
#6 Turkey
#7 Viet Nam
#8 Kazakhstan
#9 Macau
#10 Brazil
Source:
http://www.projecthoneypot.org/1_billionth_spam_message_stats.php
[...]
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.
At this milestone, we wanted to take a second to report some of our findings. Our goal is not to rehash the same old insights but instead to give a new picture that only looking at five years and a billion data points can produce.
[...]
Rather than sending spam directly, spammers primarily use "bot" machines in order to effectively launder their identities. These bots are PCs that have been compromised by a virus and whose owner usually does not know they are being used to send spam. The process is not unlike the stereotypical scene in a movie where the villain keeps his phone call from being traced by relaying it through a number of connections. Similarly, spammers' use of bots can make their messages look like they are coming from somewhere completely different than their actual location. As a result, lists of spam origin countries tell you very little about where the spammers are actually located.
On the other hand, they can help provide insight into a country's security policies because they give evidence on the number of bots operating within a country's borders. Since every country will have a different number of PCs, to make this number comparable we needed to create a ratio. We decided to look at the number of compromised machines operating within the country divided by the number of security professionals operating in the country. This gives us a relative IT security score. As a proxy for the number of security professionals we used members in Project Honey Pot. Here are the results:
Worst IT Security
#1 China
#2 Azerbaijan
#3 South Korea
#4 Colombia
#5 Macedonia
#6 Turkey
#7 Viet Nam
#8 Kazakhstan
#9 Macau
#10 Brazil
Source:
http://www.projecthoneypot.org/1_billionth_spam_message_stats.php
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