A project to help webmasters trap spammers, people who send unwanted mass emails, by adding secret code to websites, has just announced that they have registered their first billion spam emails. If printed out, these email would result in a pile of paper 110 kilometers high or the distance from Brussels to the Belgian coast. Project Honeypot, who collect the statistics, also trace the use of 'bots'. These are networks of computers, usually infected with a Trojan, a type of virus that allows them to be remotely controlled, without the owners knowledge. These machines are often used by spammers, to evade discovery. The number of bots has nearly quadrupled ever year. In 2009, you could find nearly 400,000 active bots engaged in malicious activity on any given day with several million active over the course of any month.
 
Spam is a serious problem for the EU, and EU member states feature heavily in the list of offenders. In the top 25 countries hosting spam servers, China is number one, producing 11.4% of all spam, but there are 7 EU states in the lest, producing a total of almost 25%. Symantec, an internet security company, reports that 84% of all email traffic is spam. This workload increases the cost of providing the internet infrastructure and a headache for the many companies trying to stop it overflowing their inboxes. Like the rest of us, most spammers have a working week. Monday is the biggest day of the week for spam, while Saturday receives only about 60% of the volume of Monday's messages and we may take some festive comfort in noting that there is a 21% decrease in spam on Christmas Day and a 32% decrease on New Year's Day.
 
In the meantime, senders of unsolicited messages try to fight systems to stop them. Project Honeypot has shown their persistence and inginuity by reporting that they have seen the word "Viagra" spelled at least 956 different ways in order to try and trick spam filters (e.g., VIAGRA, V1AGRA, V!AGRA, VIA6RA, etc.). Sadly, this is not going to go away. Symantec warn that "The economics behind spam dictate that 2010 will be another active year for spammers. The distribution of spam emails is set to continue as long as distribution channels remain relatively cheap, botnets continue to be active and shift locations, and spammers develop new and inno-vative ways to attempt to bypass antispam filtering."
 
It is calculated that only 1 in 12,500,000 spam emails is responded to, but the sheer number of messages sent, means that this inough for the senders to make a living. The risks are low as law enforcement find this a difficult crime to prosecute, but some are caught, including the "Godfather of Spam," Alan Ralsky who was sentanced to 51 months in an American prison for reportedly sent 70 million messages a day. In the meantime, remember that Nigerian princes aren't really going to offer millions to strangers for using their bank account, the medicines on sale are likely to be fake and yu can't win a lottery that you haen't entered.