Michael Jackson tops spam list

By Jessica Stanic on Thursday, 16 July 2009

Symantec’s July State of Spam report has revealed that Michael Jackson has topped the spam list, closely followed by Twitter.

An increasing number of spammers have attempted to use Jackson’s death to their advantage to send out several spam and malware campaigns. The trend of spammers using attachment images to get the attention of email users has also re-emerged as a top spam threat, along with using fake attachments, as was the case with Twitter.

Spammers sent out fake Twitter invitations carrying a mass-mailing worm, using the reputation of the Twitter brand to lure people into the scam.

Similarly the number of phishing attacks has increased by 21 percent in comparison to May, with the number of phishing URLs generated using automated phishing toolkits increasing by nine percent.