Pornographic spam dropped to an all-time low (as a percentage of overall spam) in February, according to a report from vendor Symantec Corporation. The drop is attributed to spammers concentrating on health-related products and other general product pitches.

Pornographic spam comprised just 3 percent of the total amount of spam last month. This included pornography, personal advertisements and relationship advice, as well as other messages containing or referring to products or services for people over the age of 18.

Emails offering health-related products and general goods and services both shared the top ranking spam category with 24 percent of unwanted email. Of all spam, 21 percent was related to financial products, 15 percent offered internet services and three percent were phishing scams, according to Symantec.

The monthly report also found that attackers are combining slanted text with other image spam obfuscation techniques to avoid detection. Rather than making changes to individual characters within the text of the image, the text is slanted at either an upward or downward angle. The method hampers optical character recognition technology, which tries to read the text within images, Symantec said.

Improvements in blocking and filtering methods have driven spammers to use new techniques to get into inboxes. Some 38 percent of the spam sent in February used images in messages, which makes it more difficult for security software. Messages appear to be more unique, allowing them to bypass a filter.

Meanwhile, new research from Marshal reported that spam is at its highest levels ever, with an increase of 280 percent since last October.

The report, released Monday, said spam levels had jumped 30 percent in the past week with a sudden surge of unwanted emails coming from South Korea, China and Russia. Image spam, which usually accounts for 15 to 20 percent of all spam, now makes up 35 percent of unwanted email, according to Marshal.

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Entry was posted on Friday, March 9th, 2007 at 11:55 am under Adult content, Spam.

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