All in a Spammer’s Workweek: Where Do the Busiest Spammers Work Around the Clock?

IBM X-Force Kassel is a research team that operates massive spam honeypots and monitoring, gleaning data from billions of unsolicited emails every year. With such large amounts of spam coming in, we can more easily map trends. We looked at one recently when analyzing the spammer’s workweek.

Our goal in this analysis was to delve into six months of data to gain insight into when spammers and their spam bots do the most work, by weekday and hour range. We also aimed to look at the countries where spam originates to figure out where the hardest-working spammers go to launch their malicious schemes.

To examine these geospecific tendencies, we used the IP address of the spam’s sender to define the source geography. Our data range was December 2016 to June 2017.

A Daily Grind

The first finding we looked at is the weekly trend of how spam works. In the past, we’ve found that spammers are an organized bunch, and they plan their workdays around business hours. The data in our traps confirmed that this trend still holds true. Over 83 percent of all spam was sent during weekdays, with significant drops on weekends across the different geographies where spam messages originated. Over the six-month period we analyzed, the biggest day for spam was Tuesday, followed by Wednesday and Thursday.

Get all the statistics and conclusions from our research on this blog post here.