Spam levels rise in Australia

Australian spam levels have increased more than three percent and are now at 66.5 percent, according to the MessageLabs August 2008 Intelligence Report. Virus levels sit at one in every 146.1 emails.

The latest exploited services are Goggle’s Picasa Web Albums and Adobe Flash redirection techniques. While the spam from both these techniques accounted for less than two percent of spam in August, this number is expected to rise. 

“Over the course of this year, spammers have been highly focused on using as many of Google’s free, hosted services as possible to distribute spam,” said Mark Sunner, MessageLabs chief security analyst. “Not only are the links contained within the spam emails difficult for traditional anti-spam filters to detect as they appear to be legitimate URLs, but it is also much more unlikely such filters will block emails based on the URLs they contain without causing significant collateral damage.” 

Visit www.messagelabs.com.au for more information.