I received an email today from the Project Honey Pot Team announcing their latest milestone: Project Honey Pot received its 1 billionth spam message. I use Project Honey Pot, along with Akismet, for comment Spam on this blog and it works great! If you're not using these guys, you should be.

They have published some Spam statistics based off of five years worth of data. Some of the highlights include:

• Monday is the busiest day of the week for email spam, Saturday is the quietest
• 12:00 (GMT) is the busiest hour of the day for spam, 23:00 (GMT) is the quietest
• Malicious bots have increased at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 378% since Project Honey Pot started
• Over the last five years, you'd have been 9 times more likely to get a phishing message for Chase Bank than Bank of America, however Facebook is rapidly becoming the most phished organization online
• Finland has some of the best computer security in the world, China some of the worst
• It takes the average spammer 2 and a half weeks from when they first harvest your email address to when they send you your first spam message, but that's twice as fast as they were five years ago
• Every time your email address is harvested from a website, you can expect to receive more than 850 spam messages
• Spammers take holidays too: spam volumes drop nearly 21% on Christmas Day and 32% on New Year's Day
• And much more.....

Click the following link for the Full Report:
http://www.projecthoneypot.org/1_billionth_spam_message_stats.php

They have published it under the Creative Commons Attribution license, so feel free to share anything you find interesting.

These are some very interesting statistics, and I highly recommend taking a few minutes to read through them. You never know what you might learn.

1 billion Spam messages. Man, if I had a dollar for each one of those...