An Empirical Study of Spam and Spam Vulnerable email Accounts

摘要

Spam messages muddle up users inbox, consume network resources, and build upDDoS attacks, spread malware. Our goal is to present a definite figure aboutthe characteristics of spam and spam vulnerable email accounts. Theseevaluations help us to enhance the existing technology to combat spameffectively. We collected 400 thousand spam mails from a spam trap set up in acorporate mail server for a period of 14 months form January 2006 to February2007. Spammers use common techniques to spam end users regardless of corporateserver and public mail server. So we believe that our spam collection is asample of world wide spam traffic. Studying the characteristics of this samplehelps us to better understand the features of spam and spam vulnerable e-mailaccounts. We believe that this analysis is highly useful to develop moreefficient anti spam techniques. In our analysis we classified spam based onattachment and contents. According to our study the four years old heavy usersemail accounts attract more spam than four years oldlight users mail accounts.The 14 months old relatively new email accounts don't receive spam. In somespecial cases like DDoS attacks, the new email accounts receive spam. DuringDDoS attack 14 months old heavy users email accounts have attracted more numberof spam than 14 months old light users mail accounts.