What do Indiana Jones, Dunkin’ Donuts and John McCain all have in common? They are all victims of “brand hijacking,” one of several trends highlighted in recent installments of Symantec’s monthly State of Spam Report.

In February, Symantec began posting and archiving its spam reports online. Look at www.symantec.com/business/theme.jsp?themeid=state_ of_spam to get a sense of the carrots spammers might be dangling in your employees’ inboxes in a given month.

“It all goes back to brands and name recognition,” says Dermot Harnett, principal analyst for the anti-spam team at Symantec, a Cupertino, Calif.-based company that sells infrastructure software. Spammers often go for what recipients already know. “These are the things that interest people in their day-to-day lives.”

One recent campaign that promised a link to the new “Indiana Jones” trailer was, instead, a guise for completely unrelated spam. Cashing in on the constant attention given to political candidates during an intense primary season, spammers have promised Hillary Clinton videos but instead relay a malicious Trojan, according to the March Symantec report. Others have linked John McCain and Barack Obama’s names to items like “portable de-wrinkle machines.”

Some spammers have resorted to what Symantec dubbed “Google Search abuse” – using an URL that looks like a search string for Google – which links instead to the spam domain mentioned at the end of the URL.

Retailers often make prime targets for spammers trying to hide behind established brands, Harnett says. Spammers have lately promised gift cards from companies such as Target, Wal-Mart and Dunkin’ Donuts in an effort to get recipients to click on a link.

                          

Spamming trends
Among the other trends noted in recent Symantec reports:
Overall spam volume now represents a staggering 78.5 percent of all e-mail tracked for the February and March reports. “Spammers are finding it increasingly difficult to get around anti-spam filters,” Harnett says, “so they’re throwing a lot more spam at them hoping to evade some of these filters.”

An increasing percentage of spam messages (roughly 44 percent, up from 31 percent last summer) appear to originate from Europe. (It is difficult to determine the actual origin because some spammers use Trojans to relay e-mail and mask their true geographic location.) About 35 percent of recent spam appears to originate in North America.

Nearly half of the messages passing through the Symantec Probe Network were classified as being related to products (goods and services such as investigation services or make-up) or the Internet (web hosting, web design or, ironically, anti-spamware).

Globally, health-related spam represents only 12 percent of messages passing through the network — but it is the No. 1 spam category in the Asia/Pacific region, where 38 percent of spam relates to subjects like pharmaceuticals, medical treatments and herbal remedies.

Image spam has decreased and, not surprisingly, so too has the average message size — a bit of bright news in an otherwise frustrating spam landscape. Image spam peaked at 52 percent of all spam in January 2007, Harnett says.?” It’s good news for IT managers as it does present less of a strain on their resources.”

Harnett thinks back to 2004, when Microsoft chairman Bill Gates was quoted as saying that the issue of spam would be solved by 2006. “We haven’t seen that,” he says, adding that spammers have simply evolved and adapted. “Spam will continue to exist in one form or another as long as there are enough people who respond.”