Political spam on the rise says Symantec

Ron Paul, MP3s, and global warming…what do they all have in common? No, it’s not some new presidential campaign.

They were all topics leveraged in new spam tactics in October 2007 according to the latest Symantec Spam Report document.

The documet points out that while overall spam levels continue to slowly inch upwards - 70.5% of all email traffic in October - Symantec continues to observe spammers seeking out new alternatives to old favorites such as image spam and PDF spam.

Symantec says that fraud and scams are on the rise though, with these categories being 18% of all spam in October 2007, up from 13% in the previous month.

Highlights from this month's report included e-mails with messages of support to a presidential candidate, mp3 spam making its debut and ann all new "click away the carbon" campaign where users are invited to provide a range of pesonal information in exchange for a "donation" to a carbon credit project.

Image spam dips further, tumbling dramatically since January 2007 and now counting for around 7% of total spam.

Another "innovation" is the use of Google Searches to hide URLs. Spammers are exploiting Google searches by using Google’s advanced search operators to direct end users to a spam URL.