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Monthly Spam Landscape
Ron Paul, MP3s, and global warming…what do they all have in common? No, it’s not some new presidential campaign. They were all topics leveraged in new spam tactics in October. While overall spam levels continue to slowly inch upwards—70.5% of all email traffic in October—Symantec continues to observe spammers seeking out new alternatives to old favorites such as image spam and PDF spam.
Highlights from this month included:
- Spammers cast their presidential vote: As the presidential campaigns heat up, one candidate receives an endorsement from a particular spammer. (See Page 6)
- Fraud and scams on the rise: These categories accounted for 18% of all spam in October. (up from 13% in September)
- MP3 spam makes its debut: Stock spam finally finds it’s voice. (See page 7)
- Image spam dips further: Image spam which has tumbled dramatically since January 2007 continues to stagnate around 7% of total spam. (See Page 5)
- Spammers exploiting Google searches: Spammers have started using Google’s advanced search operators to direct end users to a spam URL. (See Page 16)
- Additional insight is provided below on the following tactics:
- Trick or Treat! Happy Halloween Spam
- Spammers’ Interest in the Housing Market Continues
- Spanish-language Pharmaceutical Spam
- Russian Bride Spam
- Spam Spotlight: Regional Spam Trends APJ
Percentages of Email Identified as Spam
Defined:
Worldwide Internet Mail Gateway Spam Percentage represents the number of messages that were processed and classified as spam versus the total number of messages processed when scanned at the mail gateway. This metric represents SMTP layer filtering and does not include the volumes of email detected at the network layer
