Spam levels hit new high in Q3 2007

A massive 95 percent of all emails sent during the last quarter were spam, found Commtouch’s report. Based on the automated analysis of billions of email messages a week, the report also outlines which methods spammers are using and which are falling out of favor.

“Blended threat messages”, which are spam messages with links to malicious URLs, reached a new level of usage and accounted for up to 8 percent of worldwide email traffic during the last quarter.

“Blended spam demonstrates the ingenuity of spammers to attempt to evade detection,” said Amir Lev, Commtouch president and chief technology officer. “Most antivirus and anti-spam technologies are not capable of blocking these types of messages, so the malware threats are allowed to penetrate the users’ computers.”

Meanwhile, image spam fell to under 5 percent of all spam, down from 30 percent in Q1 2007 and PDF spam fell from around 10 to 15 percent in early July but has dropped to remain around the 3 to 5 percent mark.

Pharmaceuticals and sexual performance enhancers were the most popular spam subjects, at 30 percent and 23 percent respectively.

Commtouch's 13-page report can be viewed here (pdf).

Tags: email marketing, malware, spam