Spam messages punting pornographic websites dropped in frequency to reach an all time low last month.
Adult spam represented only three per cent of the total amount of spam sent, while overall junk mail levels remained virtually unchanged, according to a study by net security firm Symantec.
Health, financial and product spam dominate the junk mail landscape with scam emails accounting for a mere eight per cent of junk mail traffic.
Symantec reckons 70 per cent of the total email volume in February was spam, a slight increase on previous months. Many of these spam messages (38 per cent) adopted the increasingly popular tactic of displaying spam messages in the form of images, a tactic designed to foil less sophisticated anti-spam software.
A separate study by email filtering firm MessageLabs, also covering February, paints a different picture of junk email trends. MessageLabs reckons the global ratio of spam in email traffic was 77.8 per cent (or one in 1.29 emails), an increase of two percentage points on previous months.
One in 203.7 (0.49 per cent) of emails sent in February involved some form of phishing attack. MessageLabs estimates 55.4 per cent of all malicious emails intercepted in February were phishing attacks, a decrease of 0.8 percentage points from January 2007.
译文参考
色情邮件发送率降至历史最低点
根据最新统计显示，二月份，色情邮件的发送率降至历史最低点。
来自著名软件公司----赛门铁克公司的一项关于网络安全的研究报告显示：色情邮件占了整个垃圾邮件总数量的百分之三，带有欺骗性质的健康、金融、产品邮件占了整个垃圾邮件总数的百分之八。从总体来看，垃圾邮件的总体数量还是处于平稳状态。
另外，该公司还对二月份的垃圾邮件进行了测算，他指出，在整个邮件总数当中，垃圾邮件占了百分之七十。而在这些垃圾邮件当中，有百分之三十八的垃圾邮件是以图片的形式向外传播，这是对目前最先进的反垃圾邮件软件的一个挑战，同时也增大了打击垃圾邮件的难度。
来自邮件过滤公司MessageLabs（该公司对二月份的垃圾邮件作了一项调查，并绘制了一幅反映垃圾邮件走向的示意图）的调查显示，全球垃圾邮件的数量占了整个邮件数量的百分之77.8（即1：1.29），与前几个月相比，增加了两个百分点。
据了解，一些垃圾邮件仍然涉及网络钓鱼行为。据MessageLabs公司报告显示，二月份，被拦截的涉及网络钓鱼的垃圾邮件数量占了整个垃圾邮件数量的百分之五十五点四，比一月份下降了0.8个百分点。