The events in Egypt over the past few days have captured the attention of people around the world. As history unravels in Egypt, there have been attempts to cut down on all communications. We’ve been tracking the spam output originating from Egypt in our systems over the past few days.
As also reported by Arbor networks, around 2:00 pm on January 27 we started noticing a fall in spam traffic from Egypt. When we look at a city-level breakdown, it appears that traffic from Cairo was affected immediately. Traffic from Giza seemed to continue for a few more hours, albeit at spotty levels, and eventually dropped off around midnight Pacific Time:
Since then, traffic from Egypt has been eerily silent. Interestingly, however, we’ve seen a handful of hours during which traffic does appear to show up just for a bit in Cairo and Giza.
Historically, Egypt has accounted for around 0.1% of spam in terms of country of origin. We don’t look forward to seeing an increase in spam, but in this case we’ll definitely be hoping and watching for a return to normality in Egypt.