An Empirical Study of Spam and Spam Vulnerable email Accounts

TL;DR

This study analyzes 400,000 spam emails over 14 months to understand spam characteristics and vulnerabilities in email accounts, revealing patterns related to account age and usage that can inform better anti-spam strategies.

Contribution

It provides empirical data on spam patterns and account vulnerabilities, highlighting how account age and usage influence spam susceptibility.

Findings

Older heavy user accounts attract more spam.

New accounts generally receive less spam, except during DDoS attacks.

Spam characteristics vary based on attachment and content types.

Abstract

Spam messages muddle up users inbox, consume network resources, and build up DDoS attacks, spread malware. Our goal is to present a definite figure about the characteristics of spam and spam vulnerable email accounts. 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 spam vulnerable e-mail accounts. We believe that this analysis is highly useful to develop more efficient anti spam techniques. In our analysis we classified spam based on attachment and contents. According to our study the four years old heavy users email accounts attract more spam than four years oldlight users mail accounts. The 14 months old relatively new email accounts don't receive spam. In some special cases like DDoS attacks, the new email accounts receive spam. During DDoS attack 14 months old heavy users email accounts have attracted more number of spam than 14 months old light users mail accounts.