Penny stocks and sex-enhancing drugs are the most prevalent subjects of spam messages, according to BitDefender.
BitDefender Labs found that within the first six months of 2007, spam messages focused on pump-and-dump penny stocks were the most prevalent of all spam messages, and that image spam was the medium of choice for the senders of these spam messages.
Spam focused on sex-enhancing drugs was found to be a distant second in BitDefender's ranking of image spam.
Image spam subjects:
1. Stock - 75%
2. Drugs (sex-related) - 8.1%
3. Replica watches - 5%
4. Mortgage - 4%
5. Phishing - 2%
6. Porn - 2%
7. Diploma - 1%
8. Drugs (weight-loss related) - 0.9%
9. Travel - 0.5%
10. Software - 0.5%
11. Other topics - 1%
While image spam was shown to be the method of choice for penny stock spammers, BitDefender Labs found text spam to be the preferred choice for drug-related topics.
Spam messages focused on sex-enhancing and weight-loss drugs accounted for 56.2% of all text spam, while spam messages focused on replica watches came in at third place in both of BitDefender's image and text spam lists.
Text spam subjects:
1. Drugs (sex-related) - 42.5%
2. Drugs (weight-loss related) - 13.8%
3. Replica watches - 9.1%
4. Mortgage - 7.4%
5. Phishing - 4.2%
6. Electronics - 3.8%
7. Travelling - 3.6%
8. Stock - 3.6%
9. Software - 2.5%
10. Diploma - 2.1%
11. Grants - 1.5%
12. Dating - 0.5%
13. Other topics - 5.4%
New types of spam have emerged in 2007, most notably hosted-image spam, which instead of containing an image, provides a link to a Web site hosting the spam. Spam with attachments, such as a PDF file, is another type that has become more apparent since the beginning of 2007.
"Among the trends we found were that spammers are e-mailing fewer targets at a time, while introducing small variations in every e-mail sent in hopes of avoiding timely detection," said Vlad Valceanu, head of BitDefender's Antispam Lab.
"We expect to see more of this in the next half of the year, as well as an increased use of attachments and possibly even embedded flash."
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