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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."
"one man's malicious traffic"
Sounds like a cool title for a future book about Gill Bates.
If only MS employees spent more time working on their software, and less time doing these kinds of things...
...pretty pictures though, did anyone else try the "magic eye" deal and see what I saw?
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
An interesting aside: Raymon Chen is mentioned in the Linux kernel's source 'CREDITS' file:
N: Raymond Chen
E: raymondc@microsoft.com
D: Author of Configure script
S: 14509 NE 39th Street #1096
S: Bellevue, Washington 98007
S: USA
My primary account receives nearly 500 spam messages a day, and the number is growing. It would only take me 6 months to get that amount of spam. It seems like Raymond Chen is less than average in the amount of spam received. The data analysis is intriguing, nonetheless, and I'm glad he had the forsight to do this project.
Monitor bandwidth usage on IIS6 in real-time: http://www.waetech.com/services/iisbm/
Now he'll get even more spam.
"Until you do what you believe in, how do you know whether you believe in it or not?" -- Leo Tolstoy
I think if I were to actually see what went into Spam I'd never be able to eat it again.
One of several talks of his on spam (complete with more graphs): http://www.linuxchile.cl/docs.php?op=verVersion&do c=64&id=1
And he's even done generated some really really horribly insane spam collages, but I'll let those interested dig around for them on their own.
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.
Single worst spam day by number of messages: August 22, 2002. 67 pieces of spam. The vertical blue line.
This guy needs to get out more. I set up monitoring of all my spam and total message traffic for the last couple years. My current average is around 350-450 spams per day. Check out the spam report I run every night.
Virii? That's a different report. I seperate my virii out of the entire mail feed for the 3-4 domains I run (yay amavisd and postfix). The virii report is a lot more variable, with as many as 1600 viruses a day, and as few as 10, though that's pretty rare.
Spam filtering here is done via amavisd + postfix + spamassassin + some custom rules.
Event Management Solutions : http://www.stonekeep.com/
When I was back in school I never had spam in my university account, but that was before the 2002 spike shown on his graph. I wonder if school email accounts are still off limits. When I was in school, I did not get spam there, it was my "free" email accounts that had spam.
Come and say hi. http://forum.penpals.com/index.php
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.
When men used to be men
Although we all hate spam, at least we can engage in some harmless macho posturing re the amount of it that we get.
I'm a mere minnow in comparison to your good self: Just 57 per day, on average.
Me off to stuff a pair of socks into my pants...
From the page:
Note that this chart is not scientific. Only mail which makes it past the corporate spam and virus filters show up on the chart.
*DOH*
I'd like to have saved every BSOD that I've received since 1997 and make a cool visual representation, too, but the system crashes each time I get one... so much for data retention.
DT
Is this thing on? Hello?
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.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
THIS site even has an animation of the propagation of spam.
A Microsoft employee keeps a record of his ever-increasing levels of spam and viruses?
Aargh! My irony meter has gone off the scale!!
Does that mean that Bill Gates will be sending me the money he owes me for forwarding all those emails?
Read the blog. This guy is one prolific programmer. He's the guy who ensures that all the old windows apps (like the ones from 10 years ago) keep running on the latest versions of windows. He has all sorts of stories about windows bugs and idiosyncracies and explains how they all came to be. It's a fascinating read and I have an RSS subscrption to his blog.
Read this article which is all about his quest for windows and developer backwards compatiblity.
He give this story about Sim City: It deallocated memory, and then used it right after deallocation. It was a bug that windows 95 allowed. So his code make a special check that you were running sim city and if you were, you could use memory right after you deallocated it. It's pretty amazing to see all the hoops that he and his team jump through. But he's a MSFT ledgend.
PS. That blog entry I linked to sent Shockwaves through Microsoft. It's changed the new XML api design, and resulted in the backporting of Avalon to Windows XP.
Excellent idea. You go first.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Have you head of Mailinator?
Basically, you can make up any e-mail address, say foobar2004@mailinator.com and go and check it later. All you have to do is type in your chosen name and check for mail. It's useful for websites you don't really trust (but not for those you might continually receive useful mail from). And, of course, it's incredibly unsuitable for any personal information, since anyone can check any "account" if they can guess its name. And e-mails only stay for a certain number of hours/days. But for quick signups that just require some sort of e-mail address, it works.
R.Mo
2002 must be the year when Florida got connected to the internet.
I think it was before 2000 that I last had that few spams in a day. <wry grin> That's what happens when you have an old email address and like to post to Usenet....
Catherine
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...
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places