Marshal, the Secure email and Internet gateway security provider, released today the findings of its second Marshal TRACE (Threat Research and Content Engineering) Biannual Report for 2007.

    Total spam volume has increased by over 50 per cent in the later half of 2007 as stated by the report.

    Nearly 70 per cent of all spam in the year was comprised by health spam, promoting pharmaceuticals such as weight loss pills, which was the dominant spam category in 2007.

    While interestingly, Stock spam declined in the second half of 2007 to 1 per cent of all spam, compared to 50 per cent in February 2007.

    The report also shows that several new botnets have overtaken the infamous Storm botnet as the largest single sources of the world’s spam. “Mega-D”, a botnet that heavily promotes male sexual enhancement pills, accounted for 32 per cent of all spam in circulation in November-December 2007.

    The report also found that a new gang, touted the “Celebrity Gang” was responsible for 20 per cent of all spam during the same period.

Other key report findings include:
• The proportion of image spam declined further to under 5 per cent as spammers reverted back to plain text and HTML formats during the later half of 2007
• Spammers experimented with new formats in 2007, including PDF, Excel, and MP3 file attachments, but these formats were short-lived
• Overall phishing levels remained around 0.5 per cent as a proportion of all spam during the second-half of the year.
• Major phishing targets remained the banking institutions. However, these targets changed every few weeks as phishers constantly sought new victims.
• The distinction between spam and malware became increasingly blurred as the spam-sending botnets sought to expand their networks by using email to ‘advertise’ the presence of malware on websites.
• There was a marked shift to using the Web to distribute malware, involving both hacked websites and spammed forums and blogs that were used to drive users to websites hosting malicious code.