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Because sending spam remains the primary use of bots, Project Honey Pot has a unique perspective on bot network activity. Since 2004, active bots have grown at a compound annual growth rate of more than 378%. In other words, the number of bots has nearly quadrupled ever year. In 2009, you could find nearly 400,000 active bots engaged in malicious activity on any given day with several million active over the course of any month.

Fortunately, Project Honey Pot's coverage of active botnets has grown over time at an even faster rate. In 2006, we saw less than 20% of the active bots on any given day. Today we see more than 80%.

While tracking bots has become a critical aspect of Project Honey Pot, we remain curious where the spammers are actually located. To get at this information it's critical to look at spammer activities that are not laundered through bots. While sending email spam can easily be done in parallel (i.e., 1 million machines can send one message each) harvesting email addresses, which involves crawling web pages, cannot. This makes sense: crawling without centralized command and control will result in a lot of crawling of the same popular pages over and over again.