We decided to active the greylisting antispam solution for all our mailboxes at work.. here how it shows on our graphs:
Tag - statistics
Thursday 16 August 2007
Web Server Software and Malware
By ArnY on Thursday 16 August 2007, 23:50 - security
From Google Online Security Blog:
"In this post we investigate the distribution of web server software to provide insight into how server software is correlated to servers hosting malware binaries or engaging in drive-by-downloads."
Their numbers are slightly different from Netcraft's ones, but they give a fairly good explanation about it. According to Google IIS and Apache are sharing the same percentage in the overall malware distributing web servers.
Interesting facts: in the US Malwares are served at 80% by Apache, in China at 95% by IIS...
Monday 23 July 2007
facetime: IM & P2P attacks on the rise
By ArnY on Monday 23 July 2007, 15:11 - security
Facetime
Security Labs, an IM Security focused research lab, recently reported that
IM & P2P attacks were on the rise: a 5% inscrease of incidents targeting
public IM and P2P channels for Q2 2007 compared to Q1 2007. Just to compare,
over the same period in 2006 a 35% decrease was seen.
The SpywareGuide Greynets Blog summarizes:
From Q1 to Q2 2007, attacks spread via the mainstream networks (Yahoo, MSN and AOL) dropped from 74 total incidents in the first period to 64 in the second quarter. Attacks spread via AOL dropped by more than half > (from 28 incidents to 13). Overall, the MSN network accounted for 50 percent of the attacks on the major networks, followed by Yahoo at 30 percent and AOL with 20 percent.
As we predicted earlier this year, attacks spread via Internet Relay Chat (IRC) continue to account for a growing percentage of all attacks. In fact, the percentage of attacks that are IRC-based has risen in each of the last six quarters, rising from a 59 percent share in Q1 2006 to 72 percent in the current quarter.
Saturday 3 March 2007
greylist experimentation results
By ArnY on Saturday 3 March 2007, 19:56 - spam
Here at work, we are averaging 66% of spam, which means that most of our users get twice as much spam as regular mails. I know some users who even gave up on email because they were getting 90% of spam. We use spamassassin and CRM114 so we tag every detected mail (we aren't allowed to delete mails, even if spamassassin scores it at 1000, security reasons). Still, users like to complain that they get too much spam.
Anyway.. we decided it was time to test greylisting to try to reduce the amount of pollution in users' mailboxes.
Wednesday 10 January 2007
Mysterious drop in fraud and spam
By ArnY on Wednesday 10 January 2007, 18:38 - spam
Security firm SoftScan noticed a 30% drop in spam levels last week attributing that cut to a "broken" botnet.
SoftScan is still investigating the possible cause of the significant drop in junk mail volumes it's recording but reckons the most likely explanation is that hackers have temporarily lost control of a significant network of compromised machines. It seems unlikely that new computers at Christmas had much to do with affecting the number of compromised machines out there.
Alternatively the drop in spam might be a result of the recent earthquake in Asia disrupting spamming activity from that region, but this theory fails to explain a gradual (rather than more sudden) drop off in spam levels this month.
By contrast junk mail levels remained much as normal throughout December including the period around the 26 December earthquakes off Taiwan. Nine in ten emails processed by Softscan last month (89.4 per cent) were >identified as junk mail. Only one in 200 emails (0.5 per cent) scanned by the firm last month were infected by malware, despite the outbreak of a worm that posed as a seasonal "Happy New Year" greeting late in the month.
Wednesday 13 December 2006
Spam Statistics from Marshal TRACE
By ArnY on Wednesday 13 December 2006, 09:20 - spam
Marshal a company specialized in mail and internet security has some very nice statistics about what's going on in the world with spam, virus and phising. They provide interesting stats:
- percentage of spam detection using their own solution
- percentage of image spams
- average size of spam messages
- spam volume index
- spam by category
- spam sources by country
- (...)
- Image Spam Over Time