Spam at an All Time High

According to Symantec’s State of Spam Report, spam hit an all time high encompassing 72% of all email traffic during the month of November.

According to Symantec’s State of Spam Report, spam hit an all time high encompassing 72% of all email traffic during the month of November.

According to Symantec’s State of Spam Report, spam hit an all time high encompassing 72% of all email traffic during the month of November. As a comparison, only half of email was spam in the second half of 2005 and only 59% of all email was spam in the second half of 2006.

Latest trends in spam include the exploitation of the success of the Storm worm. November saw a surge in spamming efforts to increase the overall capacity to send more spam email. "The fact that spam volume continued to increase and stayed up seems to signal they were having some success,” Doug Bowers, a senior director at Symantec.

This year included many spammer firsts as well as a resurgence of image spam. Some of those spammers’ firsts include launching attacks using Google alerts, SMS, and massive-multiplayer online games (MMOs). New types of spam include video and audio files and the use of bot herders.

Though image spam started out popular at the beginning of the year, it slowed to a near crawl towards December. Accounting for more than 50% of all spam in January 2007, it accounted for less than 10% in December of that same year.

Even with a heavy amount of government and private company policing, Pump and Dump Stock Scams remained one of the top categories for spam. Fraudulent scams such as phishing, has increased and evolved.