Visual history of spam and viruses
17 Sep 2004Raymond Chen from Microsoft has been saving all his spam and virus mails since 1997 and created a graphical representation of them: a dot per mail in time/size coordinates.
Some of his observations:
- Spam went ballistic starting in 2002. You could see it growing in 2001, but 2002 was when it really took off.
- The big red splotch in August 2003 around the 100K mark is the Sobig virus.
- The horizontal line in 2004 that wanders around the 2K mark is the Netsky virus.
Source: Visual history of spam But no worries, Bill Gates promised to terminate spam by 2006.
