Replica watches are all the rage these days. It seems with all the spam that I’ve seen lately about replica watches, they are the "must have" of the season. Come get your replica watch at hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars off the retail price of the authentic version!

Replica watches are not a new thing. No, they have been hawked on the Internet and streets of major cities for a long, long time. What we at Symantec have recently been seeing, is wave after wave of email spam regarding replica watches over the past few days. Most of these attacks have been high in volume.

What specifically are theses spammers hawking? Replicas of Rolex, Cartier, Breitling, Omega, Hermes, and many other top brands. When you click on the link provided in the spam emails, the intent of the spammers becomes obvious as you are taken to Web sites with large pictures of the wares that they are trying to sell. Every time I open a link to a replica site, I can almost hear the...

It seems like only yesterday I was blogging about a new spam report that Symantec Messaging and the Web Security team have published regarding the state of spam. Now, the February report is online, which gives a good overview of spam activity in January of 2007.

This issue highlights several interesting trends. While spam continues to be a high percentage of all email, there was a slight reduction of spam in January to approximately 69 percent. The technique du jour, image spam, reached a high in January, but ended the month around 30 percent. It's amazing to think that 30 percent of the total spam volume is image spam. We look at it every day, and still it continues to arrive, most notably in emails for penny stock and fake Rolex.

Have you noticed a decline in adult-oriented email lately? So have we. Once consistently in the top categories of...

The Symantec Messaging and Web Security team started off 2007 with the release of a new monthly report geared towards the media. This report, entitled The State of Spam: A Monthly Report was released last week, covers December 2006, and can be found here.

Do you want to know what the top spam type for last month was? Or how about what new techniques spammers are currently using? Did you see some unusual spam in your Inbox? Check out our report and see if it's a new trend. People interested in what’s going on in the ever-changing world of spam will want to get their hands on a copy of this report for the metrics, latest trends, new spam examples, and data points of interest.

Have you noticed more spam? You're not going crazy. Symantec AntiSpam tracking has shown an increase in spam by over 15 percent from the month of October to mid-December. In...