I'm pleased to present you with my first ever, terribly non-scientific spam survey. I reviewed 1010 spam messages collected over the course of a month from two domains that I manage. I reviewed each message and categorized it based on the text-only content. I did not open attachments, and I certainly did not follow URLs.
The reason this is non-scientific is because: 1. I failed to collect several key points of data including the actual time range the messages are from. 2. There's an excellent chance that many messages were zapped by my server-based spam filtering thus reducing the range of categories seen here 3. Virus spam isn't represented at all: virus-laden mail never hits my inbox because the server-based filter catches some and my anti-virus software (Trend Micro Internet Security) catches the rest 4. The email client I used for these domains (Mozilla Thunderbird) doesn't always categorize spam properly and I regularly just delete it from my inbox rather than take the time to recategorize the messages as spam so the filter improves. This ensures that spam messages were lost rather than included in the survey. 5. The email addresses are on commercial domains so there aren't any "drive by" spam messages that you'd see on Yahoo, Hotmail or even Gmail now. These would be messages that spammers send by automatically generating (geek-speak for "guessing" using a program) email addresses.
Enough nonsense, on to the results:
314 31% Willy Growth, etc. 219 22% Online Drugs (mostly Viagra, hgh, diet pille, breast enlargment, you name it) 141 14% Watches, bling 86 9% Online Casino 52 5% Russian Language Nonsense (Doesn't the Cyrillic alphabet look fun?) 40 4% Advanced Fee Fraud (Inheritance, Stolen Money, Fedex?) 39 4% Cheap Software 31 3% Saw my profile online (Suuuuure you did!) 14 Bogus Lottery Win (car, etc) 12 Loans, Cash Grants 8 Fake Degree (Life Experience MBA? Can I really put that on my resume?) 7 Phishing - Bank (Fifth Third Bank? c'mon now) 7 Stock nonsense (pump & dump penny stocks) 7 Misc product pushing (pocket vagina? um, thanks no) 6 Bogus Job Offer (fraud or identity theft for sure) 3 Bounce Message 1 Phishing - Paypal 1 Online Greetings Card 1 SEO Wild Promises (be first on Google!!)
21 Other, site links with no detail, graphic file attachments, or mystery attachment (usually eml files that open in your mail client as an attached message)
The majority of spam I received in the sample collected was, of course, offering to enhance my Willy. Not exactly a surprise, I know. Second place is clinched by offers for online medications ranging from Viagra to weight control and breast enhancement medications. I admit I was surprised by the sheer number of spam messages offering cheap or fake Rolexes which garnered this category the third top spot in the survey.
The rest of the field wasn't terribly surprising except to note that I was expecting Advanced Fee Fraud to place better than it's disappointing 6th although obvious crime overall (advanced fee fraud, phishing, fake lottery wins, identity fraud in fake job offers and loan offers) made up 8% overall of the messages collected. In addition, the sheer number of messages in Russian was odd - even the Nigerians figured out how to write in English, albeit poorly.
