A Few Quick Spam Observations from Q2 2010: Top Spam Sending Countries and More

The anti-spam team over in the Proofpoint Attack Response Center shared some statistics with me about spam trends in Q2 (April through June) of 2010 that I thought I would relate here.

First, the spam team provided a breakdown of the top 10 spam-sending countries for Q2 and you can see a graphical view of that at right (click the image for a larger view).

This data, compiled from spam messages that hit Proofpoint's spam "honeypots" (email addresses and email servers that attract and collect spam email messages), shows that the US was the top spam sending nation during the second quarter. Brazil and India took the #2 and #3 positions—unsurprisingly as the recently released Proofpoint/Commtouch Q2 Internet Threats Trend Report showed those two nations as the top hotspots for botnet infestation.

Another interesting trend observed during Q2 is that, in general, malicious email messages continued to become more difficult to detect—that is, spammers continued to innovate and use more complex obfuscation techniques. The percentage of messages containing an obvious spam URL destination, for example, fell by more than half. Similarly, image-based spam messages declined by more than a third and messages with virus-infected attachments fell by more than a quarter.

Since overall spam levels didn't decline during the quarter, what's taking the place of those easier-to-detect spam messages?

Proofpoint anti-spam engineer Scott Panzer tells me that "spoof" messages (the type commonly used in phishing attacks) have been generally on the rise and that Proofpoint's anti-spam technology catches these using more predictive approaches. (For a great deal of information on the unique, machine learning techniques that Proofpoint uses to stop spam, see our whitepaper about Proofpoint MLX.)

Proofpoint customers weren't affected by the increasing complexity of spam messages during the quarter, however, as Proofpoint's anti-spam effectiveness actually increased from an average of 99.93% during Q1 to 99.94% during Q2. As noted in Gartner's latest Magic Quadrant for Secure Email Gateways, Proofpoint is one of the few email security vendors that publicly publishes its ongoing anti-spam effectiveness. You can view Proofpoint's spam detection accuracy for the last 190 days by visiting:

http://www.proofpoint.com/products/livespamstats.php