Old spammers learn new tricks

INSECURITY OUTFIT MessageLabs says that there has been a dramatic upsurge in the amount of 'geek spam' flooding the worldwide wibble.

Geek spam contains loads of technical words in the hope of by-passing filters on anti-spam software. In its latest report, MessageLabs said that in September only 64.4 percent of mail is spam , a diminutive decrease of 0.1 percent from August. The outfit warned that this is not because spam was going away, but probably because the spammers went somewhere nice for the holidays to contemplate more nastiness later on in the year.

Virus and trojan traffic has been steadily declining since the beginning of the year. In September, the global ratio of email-borne viruses in spam was 1.12 percent, an increase of 0.1 percent since last month.

Spam Bot operations are increasing in particularly in South American countries where it is the favoured method of distributing bank trojans and phishing scams.

Phishing attacks increased dramatically in September by 0.27 percent. More than 52 percent of all the malicious emails intercepted by MessageLabs in September were pishing expeditions.

Israel continues to be the world's top spam target with spam representing 73.6 percent of all email traffic. If you want to avoid spam the best place to go is India and the best place to avoid a virus was Australia.

More here.