Take that, spambot!

Did you know that one third of your daily dose of spam may well never reach you anymore? How sad is that!

Apparently, you can thank a guy called Oleg Nikolaenko for all those fake luxury watches you ended up buying believing that would stop the flow of unsolicited mail. Now that Nikolaenko's botnet has been shut down, let's reclaim the space/time/bandwidth the junk was using up!

Wait. Has this translated into a noticeable decrease in the number of spam email you receive daily? A highly unscientific statistical experiment run on a small and non-representative data sample yields the following results. Over a 10-day period extending from Nov 21 to Nov 30, 2010, my gmail account spam folder received about 100 mails. This number drops to about 75 between Dec 11 and Dec 20, 2010. Not quite a 30+% drop, but there's a noticeable improvement from last month.

(Picture found here)

Have some of the bots become headless zombie computers on a vengeful quest of their own to fill the world's inboxes with spam?? Have you really seen any difference since this guy was arrested?

Hacked website leads to spam surge

Last month, one website of which I was a registered member got hacked. The hackers somehow managed to find a way in, got their hands on the phpBB user table and published everybody's username, email address and password for everyone to see on some other website. I guess this is the risk you take when you give out any information about yourself on the internet...

I don't care about my username or my password being advertized as they are now, because they have little to do with anything confidential. As a matter of fact, I had given a very simple password when I signed up, which I had never used anywhere else and which was only intended to be used on that site.

I have however been foolish enough to use one of my main email addresses as my contact address and am now reaping the fruits of my stupidity. This address had not been spam-free, of course, but it has clearly seen a surge in the number of unwanted messages since the hacking incident.

period	total	daily average	daily min	daily max
before	63	3.94	1	8
after	165	10.31	5	20

Over the 16 days prior to the incident, I received a total of 63 spam emails, with a daily average of a little under 4, a minimum of 1 and maximum of 8. Over the 16 days after the incident, the total amount of spam messages reached 165, with a daily average of about 10, a minimum of 5 and a maximum of 20. As a result of my stupidity, I am now receiving about 160% more spam overall than before (and counting, presumably).

Above is a chart of the daily spam activity recorded on my compromised address just before and just after the hacking incident. Can you guess when the user table information got published?