EU overtakes US in spam spewing stakes

A monthly report looking at the volumes of spam and it's latest techniques to entrap unwary users has found the percentage of spam messages originating from Europe has, for the first time, surpassed that of North America.

The January 2008 spam report from security vendor Symantec found approximately 44 per cent of all spam email now originates from Europe compared to 35.1 per cent claiming to originate from the US.

Symantec said this is a new trend that has just started taking effect, since Symantec began recording this data in August 2007, when 30.6 per cent of spam came from Europe while 46 per cent originated in the US.

The January State of Spam report also showed that as 2007 ended, spam surged and accounted for 75 per cent of all email, increasing to 83 percent in the last few days leading up to the holiday season. The December report had found that 72 per cent of email traffic was spam.

Kelly Conley, Symnatec enterprise security group manager wrote on its security response blog that spammers had also changed their techniques for the holidays by inserting seasonal oriented keywords into URLs, subject lines and embedded images within their messages.

"The objective here was to implant the holiday spirit into the readers' minds and provide blatant gift-giving ideas," she said. "The hot items Symantec observed were gift cards, electronics, replica products and the ever present cheap drugs. We observed an estimated 93 million spam messages focused on the holiday season during December."

It also highlighted that spammers are already targeting men with gift-giving ads for Valentine's Day. This new spam trend contains a picture of a designer handbag filled with beauty products. However, when the image is clicked, the recipient will be often be redirected to a dating website.

Other notable spam trends during the past month also included a decline in average size of a spam message and trends in spammers offering a quick fix to visa problems in Europe; those with bio-fuel offers looking to capitalise on rising fuel prices; and the use of the ongoing US presidential primaries to collect personal information.

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