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Virus and phising share last 6 months - 2009

Interesting to see  is that the spam rate seems to have followed the virus rate. Spam rate has been around 85 % but is now back to around 80 % again. Since many of the viruses are used to create botnets sending spam this is not that suprising.

Spam rate last 6 months 2009

More statistics at our main page and the Security Centre.

What’s even worse and something that we’ve seen lately is that users get their Google account information stolen. The spammers use the stolen information to send spam through Google’s Gmail servers by authenticating using the stolen identity. But they don’t stop there. Since they have access to the Google account, they also use the contacts in the user’s address book as recipients of the spam which not only increases the chances of slipping through spam filters but also increases the chances of the spam being read. The spam message appears to come from an address that you probably trust. An improvement the spammers could do is to translate the spam messages professionally into the language of the recipient. However, this too costly, but may be necessary in the future since it gets more difficult to get through to the more conscious internet users nowadays.

If you suspect that your password has been stolen you should change it immediately and the new one should be hard to guess. You should also make sure you always use SSL connections in Gmail (you turn this on by clicking Settings and Set ‘Browser Connection’ to ‘Always use https’). Also make sure you don’t have any viruses or spyware on your computer.

In Gmail you can see your last account activity in order to see if anyone else logged in to your account. More info here.

Forum thread of users reporting spam being sent to their contacts.

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On the second place in our virus top list on the first page you currently find the Suspect.Bredozip virus. This is actually not a virus but an encrypted zip file. However, this is a very popular way to send viruses nowadays since virus filters is not able to decrypt the file in order to scan it for viruses. Normal users don’t send each other encrypted zip files and therefore it’s safe to block them as viruses.

Furthermore we see that Trojans dominates the list. Not suprised about this actually. Everytime we help people with infected computers there are trojans or rootkits involved – feasting on the computer resources. To sum up; I thought e-mail viruses were almost extinct, but as you see our statistics show that they are very much alive.

On the top of the page you now also find the log in form which gives you easy access to your “My pages” where you access your filtered messages and handle your account. We have also added a Sign up link visible on all pages to the right in the menu.

The front page now show you live statistics including spam proportion the last hours, total number of spam mesasges blocked and on-going virus attacks. Currently the spam proportion seem to vary between 73 % and 80 % during the day.

We have also added the some “Add this” links on the top right corner of each page, so you easily can share SpamDrain using Facebook, E-mail, Twitter etc.  We hope you to share SpamDrain with your friends and collegues as much as you can. By spreading the word about SpamDrain and helping others to use SpamDrain we can all help to lower the spam levels on the internet.

Feel free to become a fan to be updated, join the discussions or just tell us how much you love SpamDrain .

Feel free to become a fan to be updated, join the discussions or just tell us how much you love SpamDrain .

Some users in spam intensive countries gets almost all their messages blocked because of their ISP has servers listed in the blacklists. They might also communicate with other users that have their mail servers blacklisted. These ISP:s do very little to be removed from the blacklists for some reasons, or they just don’t have the knowledge to stop the spammers from utilizing their servers. Such users obviously have no use of the blacklist filter and should disable it. The normal AI based SpamDrain filtering will do a much better job without the help of this filter.

To do that you Log on to the SpamDrain site and click Settings->Other. Uncheck the box “Block messages from servers listed in public black lists.” and SpamDrain will stop blocking messages only because it has been sent through a blacklisted server.

For some time, we have tested DNS blacklisting as a step after the normal SpamDrain filter. However we have not yet evaluated if the filtering gets better by doing so. What we hear from our users, the filtering works really good – even without the blacklisting we believe. So we might change this in the future.