SPAM is a pain, strike that, SPAM is a pest. SPAM fills up your inbox, makes it difficult to tell what is genuine and what isn’t and puts you at risk every time you look at it. It is fortunate that schemes such as Project Honey Pot are actively addressing the problem of SPAM – with some success.

On December 9, 2009 Project Honey Pot achieved a major milestone in receiving its 1 billionth spam message. You might question why anyone in the world would want to celebrate receiving SPAM. Well, it might be worth understanding just why Project Honey Pot collects SPAM, in their words “Project Honey Pot is the first and only distributed system for identifying spammers and the spambots they use to scrape addresses from your website.”

In celebration of the billionth SPAM message, Project Honey Pot has looked back at its data and made some quite observations, including:

• The busiest weekday for SPAM is on a Monday whereas Saturday is the quietest
• Over the last five years, you’d have been 9 times more likely to get a  phishing message for Chase Bank than Bank of America, however Facebook is quickly becoming the most phished organization online
• It takes the average spammer just 2 and a half weeks from when they first  harvest your email address to when they send you your first spam message, and that’s twice as fast as they were five years ago
• Every time your email address is harvested from a website, you can expect to receive more than 850 spam messages

It’s interesting to see from the report that the UK doesn’t figure in the top ten Best IT Security across the world, but at least it isn’t in the bottom ten Worst IT Security, I wonder if you could guess who is at the top and bottom of the security league table according to Project Honey Pot? It is also worthy of note that SPAM messages of the ilk “Can you afford to lose 300,000 potential customers?” have been estimated as being sent 100 billion times – I can’t begin to imagine managing that mailbox!

Webmasters can help the cause by installing the Project Honey Pot software on their websites, the information collected is used to help prevent Spammers around the world.

Click the following link for the Full Report from Project Honey Pot:

http://www.projecthoneypot.org/1_billionth_spam_message_stats.php