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Fraud Spam Continues To Rise
David Utter
Staff Writer
2007-07-09
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
Levels of scam and fraud spam persist in harassing email users, as Symantec's monthly spam landscape report showed an increase in those junk messages.
Frauds and scams comprised 14 percent of the spam observed by Symantec in its State of Spam Report for June 2007. That represented a rise from the 9 percent noted three months earlier in March.
Health-related spam has been on a downward trend. Those messages plunged by 10 percent over the same period, to only 13 percent of all spam in June.
At the beginning of the year, image spam owned a massive percentage of the junk cluttering inboxes. Symantec noted how image spam hit a peak of 52 percent of all spam in January 2007. It has continued to decline and now only appeared in 14.5 percent of all spam in June.
PDF spam, where a document in that format contains an image, began showing up in greater numbers in June. This usage of PDF attempts to evade current anti-image spam technology. Two instances of this have been in circulation, both supporting the typical stock pump-and-dump scam.
Criminals took some pains with one of those PDF image spams. Symantec observed how they had made their stock spam look like a professional newsletter, rather than the typical plaintext call to purchase shares.
About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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