Characterizing Spam Traffic and Spammers

There is a tremendous increase in spam traffic these days. Spam messages muddle up users inbox, consume network resources, and build up DDoS attacks, spread worms and viruses. Our goal is to present a definite figure about the characteristics of spam and spammers. Since spammers change their mode of operation to counter anti spam technology, continues evaluation of the characteristics of spam and spammers technology has become mandatory. These evaluations help us to enhance the existing technology to combat spam effectively. We collected 400 thousand spam mails from a spam trap set up in a corporate mail server for a period of 14 months form January 2006 to February 2007. Spammers use common techniques to spam end users regardless of corporate server and public mail server. So we believe that our spam collection is a sample of world wide spam traffic. Studying the characteristics of this sample helps us to better understand the features of spam and spammers technology. We believe that this analysis could be useful to develop more efficient anti spam techniques.