Project Honey Pot has just announced over one billion served – one billion pieces of spam served to Project Honey Pot that is – and with that milestone they have released their analysis of global spam trends and patterns, and it’s very interesting.

Back in 2000, Thomas L. DiStefano, III, of Boca Raton, Florida, filed a patent for a “Method For Managing Bulk E-Mail Distribution”, in which the ‘invention’ was described as a method in which if not all email in an email run was delivered the first time, the sender would repeatedly send the email to the undelivered addresses, again and again, until all of the email was eventually delivered. In 2007, DiStefano’s company, Perfect Web Technologies, sued InfoUSA, for patent infringement. InfoUSA is the parent company to such email entities as YesMail, who famously sued anti-spam blacklist MAPS for calling them a spammer, and who in 2006 paid a $50,000 fine to the Feds for violations of the CAN-SPAM Federal anti-spam law.

Twitter is fed up, and their not going to take it any more. The thing with which they are apparently fed up is spammers polluting people’s Twitter streams with everything from “make money fast” scheme sites to porn. And so Twitter has added a “this is spam” button (well, actually a “report for spam” link) to everybody’s profile, so that now you can report them to Twitter HQ with a single click.

The newest Twitter porn scam – where the Twitter users’ messages are primarily links to their x-rated website – entails the porn-pushing (or pron, if you prefer) Twitter user sending out a message thanking you for sending a “Follow Friday” their way. Only, of course, you did no such thing.

A rash of seemingly pointless spam (no links, no payload, no effort to get private information) is making the rounds, each one inquiring about the cost to get some form of music download, and each coming from a fake Gmail address, such as d12treskey@gmail.com, petersons.production@gmail.com, winstonfinancial@gmail.com and petrov.gazprom@gmail.com.

Spammers and malware pushers have turned in increasing numbers to the URL shortening services such as TinyURL, SNURL, bit.ly and is.gd as a way of getting by spam filters that recognize the actual URLs to spam and malware sites.

Well, look what the spam cat just dragged in – address book importing spam from Bebo.com. Why is it that these various social networking and other sites seem to simply consider the incidental spam attendant to address book importing (if they think about it at all) to be the cost of doing business – and, mind you, a cost sent COD to the people receiving the spam – when in fact it’s really an occupational hazard?

The Waledec botnet is using spam that claims that “Obama Quits”, explaining that “Barack Obama abandoned sinking ship” and that Obama doesn’t want any more to be president, in order to lure unsuspecting users to add their PCs to its group of zombied computers that it uses to do its dirty work. Other subject lines include “Who Will Be Our President Now?”, “End time for the USA”, and “Haven’t you heard latest news about our president-elect?”

Craig Hughes, who originally worked with the Spam Assassin team, and then went on to found GumStix, has discovered something interesting: much more spam is received during the nighttime hours than during the day. It’s a dramatic enough difference that Hughes says that he is convinced that ‘time of day received’ is a useful test to help determine whether something is spam.

Authorities in the U.S. and New Zealand have coordinated to take down big time male enhancement and supplement spammers Lance Atkinson and Jody Smith, and their Target Pharmacy, Canadian Healthcare, Inet Ventures, Tango Pay, Click Fusion, and TwoBucks Trading spam operations. Lance Atkinson and Jody Smith were the muscle behind what Spamhaus has called “the biggest spam gang in the world,” and they recruited countless affiliates to send their spam through a spam affiliate program called Affking.

The next time somebody tells you that they don’t understand what the big deal is about spam, you can tell them this story. Thousands and thousands of Virgin Media customers went without email service for two full days after a spam run took down the email servers of their email service provider, Tucows.

“You have received a postcard from a family member!”, says the subject of one of the latest spam scams.

Whenever somebody starts ranting about “the damn lawyers”, of which I’m one, mind you, I’m fond of saying “you know, 95% of the lawyers out there… make the other 5% of us look really bad.” It’s tongue-in-cheek, of course, because people expect the message following the “…” to be that 95% of the lawyers are good, and it’s the small 5% that are the bad apples. And, of course, in reality usually the numbers do flow in that direction. But unfortunately, sometimes, it’s all to true. But even I, jaded though I am, was stunned when this little gem – this blog comment spam – advertising the firm of Gersowitz, Libo & Korek – landed on the Internet Patrol today.

Wonder why you get so much spam? Wonder how spammers can possibly make money sending spam? Wonder who on earth would ever actually buy stuff from spam? Well, wonder no more. Because here’s the answer.

Prolific spammer Eddie Davidson was arrested last year, and, in April was sentenced to twenty-one months at the Federal prison in Florence, Colorado – about 3 hours north of Denver. This past Sunday, Davidson escaped from Florence Prison, and is at large.