Spam Statistics
Statistics for Week ending July 20, 2008
Spam Detection
The percentage of spam blocked on the TRACE Team's live MailMarshal servers, running standard anti-spam rules, including the SpamCensor and the SpamProfiler. The normal average is 99.5%.
Spam Message Size
The average size of a spam message. The normal value is between 5Kb-8Kb. The extremely small value reflects the current trend of sending large numbers of small, simple messages.
Image Spam
Image spam as a percentage of all spam.
Spam by Spambot Type
This chart is a proportional breakdown of spam received from each spambot type. Typically a small number of major botnets are responsible for the bulk of all spam. The Srizbi botnet continues to be extremely active, maintaining its dominant position. Note that the botnet previously known as Hacktool.spammer has been renamed to Bobax, the more common name for this botnet.
Spambot Activity Over Time
This chart shows the history of spam received from each spambot type. We now use the name Bobax instead of Hacktool.spammer, Bobax being the more widely used and understood name for that botnet.
Spam by Category
Spam broken down by categories. Product and Health Spam now account for the vast majority of all spam. Malware Spam has also significantly increased in the past week. For more information on the categories, see Spam Types.
Spam Sources by Country
This chart measures spam by country of origin as a percentage of all spam. The top 12 countries are ranked in order of the volume of spam they contribute from highest to lowest.
| This week | Last week | ||
| 1 |  | 1 | United States |
| 2 | | 2 | Turkey |
| 3 | | 3 | Russia |
| 4 | | 4 | Brazil |
| 5 | | 5 | China |
| 6 | | 6 | India |
| 7 |  | 10 | United Kingdom |
| 8 | | 12 | Argentina |
| 9 |  | 7 | Italy |
| 10 | | 9 | South Korea |
| 11 | | 8 | Poland |
| 12 | | - | Colombia |
Spam Sources by Continent
This chart measures spam by continent of origin as a percentage of all spam. Continents are ranked in order of the volume of spam they contribute from highest to lowest.
Image Spam Over Time
This chart plots image spam as a percentage of all spam over time. This technique is definitely out of favor with spammers at the moment.
Spam Volume Index (SVI)
The SVI is a measure of the volume of spam sent to a representative sample of the honeypot domains that we monitor. After a long steady increase in volume since the middle of last year, things have stabilized a little in the last three months.
