Five Years of SPAM Data

The following is published under the Creative Commons Attribution license.

• 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

I'm Looking Forward to Christmas

Free Alternative DNS Servers (Name Servers)

When you connect your computer to the internet you are given a list of name servers which carry out the duty of translating, for example, myspew.com to 71.6.165.217

Their are alternative servers available to the public which are freely available as an alternative or as an addition to your sometimes bogged down default DNS name servers.

OpenDNS provides:

• Reliable DNS Infrastructure
• Web Content Filtering
• Basic Customization
• Typo Correction

The only limitation I have found cumbersome is the need to update your public IP address.  This can be done manually, or through a client application.

Google Public DNS

As web pages become more complex and include more resources from multiple origin domains, clients need to perform multiple DNS lookups to render a single page. The average Internet user performs hundreds of DNS lookups each day, slowing down his or her browsing experience. As the web continues to grow, greater load is placed on existing DNS infrastructure.

Since Google's search engine already crawls the web on a daily basis and in the process resolves and caches DNS information, we wanted to leverage our technology to experiment with new ways of addressing some of the existing DNS challenges around performance and security. We are offering the service to the public in the hope of achieving the following aims:

• Provide end users with an alternative to their current DNS service. Google Public DNS takes some new approaches that we believe offer more valid results, increased security, and, in most cases, better performance.
• Help reduce the load on ISPs' DNS servers. By taking advantage of our global data-center and caching infrastructure, we can directly serve large numbers of user requests without having to query other DNS resolvers.
• Help make the web faster and more secure. We are launching this experimental service to test some new ways to approach DNS-related challenges. We hope to share what we learn with developers of DNS resolvers and the broader web community and get their feedback

I use a FreeBSD and BIND 9 install on my home network which utilizes the root name servers in addition to OpenDNS and Google's DNS services.  In the past, these services have been hard to come by, though through the necessity of crawling, such as the result for Google DNS, and Tier paid substitution enabling free access subscriptions, such as OpenDNS, fast and efficient alternatives are now here.