BitDefender Releases Latest Spam Topics

The latest data from BitDefender indicates spam related to sex-drugs has pushed aside stock spam to gain top place.

This may come as a surprise to anyone dealing with large volumes of PDF-based spam. However, the study was conducted over a seven month period starting in January and leading up to July of 2007. The radical surge in PDF stock spam that has confounded email blocking software only started in late June.

Other popular topics included replica watches and drugs related to weight loss. Similar reports have noted large amounts of spam related to travel, self-education and personal finance.

BitDefender also reported a variety of new approaches used by spammers to make it difficult for products designed for filtering spam to accurately process their messages.

The head of BitDefender's research labs claimed that spammers now target a relatively small of number of victims at once, and then tweak their methods to gain maximum deliverability.

Less common, but still significant spam topics include 411 scams, pirated software, matchmaking services and pornography sites.

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