Spam at an all-time high, but Porn spam at record low levels

Pornographic spam levels dropped to an all-time low in February, according to new research from Symantec, but a Marshal report showed spam levels at a record high. The report showed that only three percent of all spam collected last month could be classified as adult material. This included pornography, personal advertisements and relationship advice, as well as other messages containing or referring to products or services for people over the age of 18.

Emails offering health-related products and general goods and services both shared the top ranking spam category with 24 percent of unwanted email. Of all spam, 21 percent was related to financial products, 15 percent offered internet services and three percent were phishing scams, according to Symantec.

The monthly report also found that attackers are combining slanted text with other image spam obfuscation techniques to avoid detection. Rather than making changes to individual characters within the text of the image, the text is slanted at either an upward or downward angle to evade blocking techniques that rely heavily upon optical character recognition (OCR) or edge detection, according to the report.