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Adult Spam Has Been Going Down
David Utter
Staff Writer
2007-02-08
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Symantec's most recent State of Spam report found a spike in the amount of image spam in January decreased by the end of the month, while another trend indicated adult spam has decreased its penetration.
 | | Adult Spam Has Been Going Down |  |
Security firm Symantec dropped its latest report onto the Internet, and noted how spam activity for January held pretty consistent with trends they have seen over previous months.
Spam continues to be a massive inbox pest. Symantec said there was a little good news, as the total spam seen at the SMTP layer dropped to about 69 percent. Image spam had reached as high as 45 percent of all spam seen in January, but lowered back to 30 percent.
That decline in the amount of adult spam, now rated at 4 percent of a 90-day measurement of global spam categories used by Symantec, probably indicates less profit being seen by adult spam senders. In comparison, financial spam runs at about 25 percent of spam, the biggest category seen online.
Health and products categories each took a 23 percent slice of the spam pie. Like financial spam, those behind product or health spam want to turn a profit from their operations. Whether it's finding victims for pump and dump stock schemes, or buyers for fake pharmaceuticals, the goal is making money.
Symantec also noted they are seeing a resurgence in an ancient form of computer artwork for spamming purposes. ASCII Art uses characters available for display on a screen to create a message or image out of those.
Spammers randomize the ASCII characters used to form their messages. This makes it more difficult for anti-spam filters that look at text to catch them. But since spammers also have to include a URL, solutions that can do pattern matching against those URLs and find the ones that go to spam sites should be able to defeat them.
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Tag: Spam
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About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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