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Simon Hunt

Simon Hunt
Chief Technology Officer, Endpoint and Innovation
VP and CTO, Endpoint Security Simon Hunt has more than 20 years experience in software development, design and ...

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Click Here to See Fluffy Kittens (or Get Malware)…

Thursday, November 11, 2010 at 10:48am by Simon Hunt
Simon Hunt

Following on from my last post where I was talking about efforts we were putting in place to stifle the use of the http://mcaf.ee secure short URL provider by spam merchants, I thought I’d share with you some interesting statistics of a recent spam attack.

I pulled this pretty graph out of our Google Analytics feed which shows the lifetime of the spam message, well, in fact it shows the history of unique visitors to the page which is much the same thing:

You can see that activity started on the 22nd October (with just over 4,000 clicks) and peaked on the 1st November with just under 12,000 unique clicks. Since the 3rd November there’s been no activity on this page, indicating that the particular scam campaign has ceased.

Over the life of this campaign there were 99,816 unique people who tried to access the spam site (a bogus recipe page), all who saw our infamous blue warning banner:

This to me is interesting, because it shows the scope of spam – for the best part of 100,000 people to click the link, how many actually got the email? 5x, 10x, 100x or more?

Overwhelmingly in this case (>90%) the visitors in this particular campaign came to us from China, which is curious because the ultimate intended landing page is in English only – I can only suggest that they clicked the link either because the spam email was targeting them, or perhaps because it was in English and they could not read it.

To finish, I’ll tell you of another strange statistic in the world of Short URLs – the most popular site lately has been a news article in Dutch regarding the comedian Youp van ‘t Hek releasing a new magazine poking fun at corporate helpdesks. It only had a short lifespan of 3 days, but peaked at 75% of the clicked links – popular guy it seems!

Now, if I only read Dutch…

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