A Visual History of Spam

Cristiano writes "Microsoft employee Raymond Chen has saved every spam message and virus-laden e-mail he's received at work since 1997 and graphed the spams and viruses to create a cool visual representation of one man's malicious traffic."

Comments

Re:Obvious

[DaHat]

Do you have a problem with programmers being able to spend a little time here and their on their own projects?

Not exactly "reader friendly"

[Hockney Twang]

I would have much preferred to see the volume of email, represented in terms of the size of messages received, displayed on a nice looking bar graph, with viruses in the foreground, spam in the back. Maybe even show legit email as another row in front of the viruses. Or even just a line graph. As it is, the information is occluded by his presentation. He took some raw data, did very little to interpet it, and put it on his blog. The information could be interesting, but the presentation is very lacking.

Re:Single worst day was only 67?

[syrinje]

67 that made it past the corporate filters. I ahve to admit that makes it sound like MS has pretty good filters though.

OTOH, he could just be a man with low span suseptibility :)

Re:I just don't understand

[targo]

How did he manage to keep track of this on a M$ box without catching a few of those viruses?

Beause contrary to the popular opinion on Slashdot, you actually have to open and run the attachment yourself in Outlook in order for it to do anything. None of the big e-mail viruses have been able to spread without active help from the user. I have been running Outlook for 6 years by now and never had any problems.

Re:Raymond Chen in Linux source CREDITS

[kaleco]

Yes, he used a PERL script to generate the graph. Less than orthodox for an MS employee. His blog's 'not a .net blog' caption also hints at a certain cynicism being harboured.

Re:Only 19000 spam messages?? That's nothing.

[Holi]

It seems like Raymond Chen is less than average in the amount of spam received

Umm.. so your the average? Have you ever thought that maybe you are on the high-end of the bell curve.

Raymond Chen is less then you in the amount of spam received, who knows maybe he is exactly the average.

Why don't you poll people and find out.

I would but I dodn't care.

Re:Should we rewrite SMTP

[AndroidCat]

Excellent idea. You go first.

Re:Single worst spam day by number of messages: Au

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing is, he wrote this:

Note that this chart is not scientific. Only mail which makes it past the corporate spam and virus filters show up on the chart.

So his results are really rather meaningless. They show a drop in spam in the last year--likely because Microsoft has installed better spam filters or whatnot--when spam has actually been increasing exponentially.

Re:RTFA instead of looking at the pretty picture

[gordgekko]

I agree with the person you responded too; this guy's level of spam is nil. And, the true irony is that M$ (for whom this suck-ass works) is probably 99% of the reason spam exists anyway!

Eh? Care to explain that statement? Microsoft didn't write the first spam, didn't create the open protocol that enables spam to be sent so easily, and doesn't run the biggest ISPs where spam is sent from, though its Hotmail users seem to be quite susceptible to receiving it. So how is Microsoft responsible for virtually all spam?

I don't much care for many of Microsoft's products but let's be a little more circumspect with the accusations we throw around.

Re:RTFB

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah right, that precise guy.

oh, and, you know, if you read Microsoft typical EULAs, they forbid you to do any kind of decompiling, reverse engineering and whatsoever of their product.

and for Simcity and hundreds of other applications, they did just that.

I don't think they asked each editor for the permission to do so, and even if they are Microsoft, they had NO rights to do that otherwise.

(not to mention that more than a few editors went out of buisness and could not be asked for permission)

so who is the pirate hacking sowtfare now ?

Graph could have been better

[Sivaram_Velauthapill]

I think the graph isn't too helpful. Size vs time may be interesting to look at but it doesn't really say much. I think a more useful plot would be a frequency chart or a histogram or something like that.

I'm not dissing the work--just saying how it could have been better...