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Submitted by: Bill Hickey
NCVA List Master

NRT-0209 Spam Volume Levels Off, New Delivery Techniques Evolve:

Email spam distributors continue to try to elude detection and deliver their unsolicited messages into people's inboxes, but have made no real gains, according to the monthly spam report from Symantec. The overall level of junk email in May remained consistent with previous months at an average of 65% but image spam continued to decline, according to the report. Image spam - in which messages are sent in the form of an image in order to slip past text-based filters - fell to an average of 16% of emails sent in May, continuing the downward trend from previous months. In April, 27% of the spam Symantec detected was composed of images, down from 37% in March. The security firm in January estimated as much as 52% of spam was sent as images. As the image spam declines, Symantec said it has observed a rise in the amount of spam that embeds internet links to images that contain the message the junk emailers are trying to deliver. "Unfortunately, we do not have a specific percentage on the trend of linking to external images," said Symantec. In addition, the report shows that scam and fraud email - which includes phishing emails and advance purchase (419) fraud - rose to 13% in May, up from 9% in March. Of note, scam emails in the Asia-Pacific and Japan region were found to be 17% of spam there - nearly double the global figure of 9%.

(www.cbc.ca 07JUN07)

Last Modified: Wednesday, 20-Jun-2007 10:53:40 EDT