Nancy Street - Web Server Statistics

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Monthly Web Server Statistics

The following monthly statistics were generated from the Nancy
Street Network Internet Information Server logs by Analog 5.23.

2010

Jun

2009

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

2003

2002

Spam Statistics

The following Excel generated graph shows the trend in the daily spam (junk email) arrival counts for the period 01-Sep-02 to 09-Jul-2010 . The explosion in April 2003 supports recent print and Internet news articles that spam is now a critical problem on the Internet. The messages listed further down under the Attacks heading are not included in this graph. Notice how the introduction of the Australian Spam Act 2003 on 10-Apr-2004 had absolutely no effect at all (as everyone easily predicted). The slight drop at the end of Sep-04 was caused by the Australian Skeptics email being redelegated to new owners. The dramatic drop in Mar-05 was caused by my request that Pacific Internet activate spam and virus filtering on our mira.net email accounts. This will lower the chances of real mail getting lost in the spam noise.

Monthly Spam Totals

After changing ADSL providers to People Telecom in June 2005 the virus count dropped to near-zero, so I don't bother to keep virus statistics any more. The few vague virus related emails that to arrive are dumped into the same folders as the regular spams. After mid-March 2008 the counts will drop drastically again because all email to logofreeabc.com is now ignored. That domain was attracting nothing but thousands of spams per month.

Logarithmic plot of "bounced" emails due to forgery

So many bouncing emails due to forgeries are arriving now that I've set the mail filters to shunt them into a different folder so they can be counted separately from the spam. As you can see from the Spam Incidents listed below, at odd intervals we get bombarded with bouncing emails caused by spam being sent with forged headers blaming Nancy Street as being the sender.

Spam Incidents

02-Dec-2007
Spam Flood due to forgery

An estimated 40000 (yes, fourty thousand) "mail rejected" replies arrived directly into the SMTP server, all addressed to false accounts of the orthogonal.com.au domain. It seems that someone did a spam run with my domain as the sender. The count is an estimate based upon the arrival rate, as after the first hour I set a rule to auto-delete the incoming messages. The attack slowed and ceased after 3 days.

31-Jul-2007
Spam Flood due to forgery

About 1000 "mail rejected" replies with a total size of 9MB arrive directly into the SMTP server. They seem to be caused by a real spam-run forging logofreeabc.com as the reply address. This is similar to the spam flood of June 2003.

14-Jul-2004
Virus Flood

387 nearly identical virus infected emails with a total size of 7.5MB are addresses to the astcvic.org.au domain. Emails to this domain are auto-forwarded to various committee members, including Marcia, so Nancy Street also suffers. All were caught in the virus trap.

26-Aug-2003
Flood

340 nearly identical emails and DOC files condemning Scientology arrived for various email addresses at skeptics.com.au. Total size about 26MB. All were caught in the spam trap.

26-Jun-2003 to 30-Jun-2003
Mail Bombing due to spam forgery

A flood of 6660 delivery failure messages caused by a Korean porn spammer forging the Australian Skeptics domain in the 'From' fields with randomly generated email addresses. The average arrival rate was about 100 per hour for 4 and a half days, stopped only when the Vicnet mail administrator changed the rules to bounce all mail that was not addressed to one of the known 23 published valid address at skeptics.com.au. Total size was about 20MB.

15-May-2003
Mail Bombing deliberate attack

574 identical messages flooded the email account with a total size of 16MB. This was clearly a deliberate attack in response to a post I made in the NANAE newsgroup. Someone pasted the full text of my newsgroup post into an email, appended a single URL to a picture of Fluff, then attached a JPG of a man playing an accordion. The messages arrived in groups through dozens of different mail servers all over the world. The Mercury mail server tagged the messages as potential spam and automatically shunted all of them into a work folder. Click to popup a sample message. The text in blue is the original newsgroup post. You just have to wonder what motivates some of the the pond-scum that infect the Internet to make them even bother to do such a thing.

24-Apr-2003
Spam Bombing

560 identical messages flooded the <> and Australian Skeptics email accounts with a total size of 1710KB. Newsgroup users reported that it was widely spread incident, so it was a general spamming via multiple mail servers. Click to see a sample.