‘Tis the season to be jolly, but this month’s spam levels brought little cheer to anti-spam analysts.
Overall spam levels continued to increase, accounting for nearly three out of four emails in November. To put that growth trend into perspective, in May 2007 spam accounted for approximately
64 percent of all email traffic.
Highlights from this month included:
• Let the Olympic Spams Begin: Despite the summer games being more than 9 months away, Symantec has started seeing the first examples of spam connected to the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, China (See Page 9)
• Britney, Lindsay, and Donny Osmond Headline Meds Spam: Gossip headlines concerning celebrities being used in meds spam (see page 10)
• Spammers Winter Harvest: Symantec blocked an estimated 35 million “blank” emails sent by spammers as part of a suspected harvesting campaign to find valid email addresses for spam mailing lists (see page 10)
• Spammers Exploit Missing Child: As the search continues for the British child Madeleine McCann, one unscrupulous spammer tries to disguise a virus hosting site in spam emails with a link to the authentic FindMadeleine.com site. (See page 11)
• Fraud and Scams Continue to Rise: These categories accounted for 19% of all spam in November (up from 18% in October and 13% in September)
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