Adult spam at "all time low", report finds

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Spam of an adult nature is on the decrease, according to new research.

The "State of Spam" report released by IT security company Symantec found that adult spam now only makes up three per cent of all spam, which the company said was an "all time low".

But spam in general continues to be a pain for everyone with unwanted junk making up 70 per cent of all email sent, a slight increase on previous months. Most spam originated from North America with 39 per cent claiming to have hailed from that region. Europe was the next biggest perpetrator of spam followed by Asia.

By category, health and product spam each accounted for 24 per cent of all spam, followed by financial spam at 21 per cent. Scams made up 5 per cent and fraud emails accounted for three per cent.

Spammers are also trying to avoid image-based spam detection by slanting text. "This technique may decrease the detection capabilities of some anti-spam technologies that are heavily reliant upon OCR (Optical Character Recognition) or edge detection," the report said.

There was a surge casino spam in foreign languages in February. The report said that the attacks demonstrated a growing localisation of spam.

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