The spam donut: mostly healthy!

Today on Digg, a story is circulating about how 40% of all spam comes from one source. Its name? Srizbi. Srizbi is a thing called a botnet -- a cloaked network of parasitic spamming programs hiding inside compromised computers. If your computer gets infected by Srizbi, it becomes a "zombie" -- a member of an army of machines invisibly sending spam around the Internet, and reporting back the results -- mostly, which active e-mail addresses it has found -- back to some command center in who-knows-where.

The Srizbi report was put out by Marshall, a British e-mail security firm that has done significant research on the spam problem.  After digging around, I found this pie chart from a December 2007 spam white paper [PDF here]:

Turns out almost 70% of spam is health-related -- which is a nice euphemism for male performance enhancement. Notice how scams are only about 1%, and pornography is only 2.4%. This is an interesting window into spam economics -- clearly spammers are getting their best return by advertising pharmaceuticals and voodoo sex solutions. I'm not sure exactly what "products"' means -- unless "products" is the mechanical version of "health." For anyone who hasn't looked closely at their spam in a while, here's one I just got a few moments ago:

CA N2ADI AN PH3A RMACY SP4ECIAL

V I4AG6R A - $1.47

F3EMA LE V5IA G4R A - $1.44

C I5AL5IS - $2.26

We marked p8rices dow6n

(It's OK, you can click on it -- I changed the link to something innocuous.)

Share your noteworthy junk e-mails below, and let's see if we can spot any spam-trends of our own.

Comments

[ath]

I admit it, I got rickrolled.