Project Honey Pot Traps Billionth Spam

EastDakota writes "Project Honey Pot today announced that it had trapped its 1 billionth spammer. To celebrate, the team behind the largest community sourced project tracking online fraud and abuse released a full rundown of statistics on the last five years of spam. Findings include: spam drops 21% on Christmas Day and 32% of New Year's Day; the most spam is sent on Mondays, the least on Saturdays; spammers found at least 956 different ways to spell VIAGRA (e.g., VIAGRA, V1AGRA, V1@GR@, V!AGRA, VIA6RA, etc.) in mail received by the Project; and much more."

Comments

Spam = spy chatter?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is spam even really spam anymore?

Every now and then I take a look at my gmail spam folder, and none of the messages contain links or even coherent sentences.

Nothing being sold, nothing being said... What's the point?

Re:Spam = spy chatter?

[maxume]

My favorite theory is that spammers are making money by selling spamming services to suckers, not by actually selling a product in the spam.

I guess there is also some chance that there is some botnet out there set to verify that mail reaches addresses, and it is just running out of control.

ok

[nomadic]

1 billionth spammer

So approximately one out of every 7 people on earth is a spammer?

Re:ok

[Monkeedude1212]

And thats only the ones they've caught.

In fact, almost everyone on the net is a spammer. It's kind of a secret club, where you have to pass a secret trial, to gain your secret right of entry. It's so secret, I shouldn't even be divulging this secret information. If the secret spammers found out, I could get

Re:ok

[idontgno]

The Spam Club is sending a message. That posting was the /. equivalent of a horse's head in your bed.

In the terribly elegant words of... someone?

[Sir_Lewk]

You can't fix stupid.

Re:In the terribly elegant words of... someone?

[Opportunist]

Yes you can. Smith&Wesson released their first debugging tool for it over a century ago. The application remains illegal for some odd reason I don't really understand.

Re:In the terribly elegant words of... someone?

[dissy]

Yes you can. Smith&Wesson released their first debugging tool for it over a century ago. The application remains illegal for some odd reason I don't really understand.

Ah yes, the original 'point and click' interface for remotely managing stupid.

And it is illegal now you say? My apologies but from the place I hide to avoid stupid, we don't get many updates on all these new fangled laws.

Re:In the terribly elegant words of... someone?

[maxwell demon]

Yes you can. Smith&Wesson released their first debugging tool for it over a century ago. The application remains illegal for some odd reason I don't really understand.

Ah yes, the original 'point and click' interface for remotely managing stupid.

And it is illegal now you say? My apologies but from the place I hide to avoid stupid, we don't get many updates on all these new fangled laws.

It probably violates Amazon's one-click patent.

Re:In the terribly elegant words of... someone?

[cybiko123]

It's not for debugging, it's for troubleshooting.

Cost-benefit

[delirium of disorder]

If you total up all the productivity lost to fighting spam and time wasted getting spam, it's probably cheaper to just put the spammers out of business by giving every male on earth free Viagra.

Re:956 ways?

[daveime]

Pare, considering you've been in the "editing" stage since February 2007, perhaps it's time to update your sig to "I've grown tired of making a Low Budget HDV Filipino Horror Movie in NYC" ?

I wonder

[tool462]

I wonder how many of those Viagra spelling variations are valid Perl code...