Dermot Harnett's blog

On April 20, for the first time ever, gold rose above $1,500 an ounce as worries over the U.S. economic outlook boosted demand for the metal as a haven. Within hours, Symantec observed this spammer’s response: a hit-and-run spam attack with the Subject line “Subject: Is Gold Your Ticket To A Golden Future?”

June 25, 2009 is a day that is etched in the memory of Michael Jackson fans worldwide. Jackson's death took a lot of people by surprise—the spammers included. However, it took spammers just a few hours to take advantage of this tragedy.

...and some of it masquerades as “marketing” and “newsletter” emails.

The National Bureau of Economic Research has previously indicated that the United States has been in a recession since December 2007.

With Valentine’s day a little over two weeks away it is not surprising that spammers are already targeting this holiday. Valentine’s Day is a common target for spammers and in January 2009 the top five Valentine’s Day-related spam subject lines were as follows:

1.    Increase your length, the best valentine’s gift

The year 2000—or Y2K—was a year in which we witnessed the Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia, a United States presidential election decided by the the Supreme Court, and the burst of the dot-com bubble.

Notable highlights this month include the continuing shift of the region of message origin to APJ and South America, and changes in the average size of spam messages.
 

According to the 2002 Census of the Population, 42% of the population of Ireland has the ability to speak Irish. Irish has also had official and working language status at the EU level since January 1, 2007. Recently, some examples of spam messages in Irish—the official language of the Republic of Ireland—have been observed.

October 2009 saw spam volumes averaging at 87 percent of all email messages, which is consistent with spam volumes observed in August and September 2009, but 10.6% higher than October 2008.

Overall spam volumes averaged at slightly over 86 percent of all email messages in September 2009, which is a decrease of 4 percent since July 2009. However, it is considerably greater than September 2008 when spam levels averaged at 78 percent of all email.