Notable highlights this month include the shift of the regions of message origin, and changes in the average size of spam messages.

  • In recent months, APJ and South America have been taking the spam share away from the traditional leaders of North America and EMEA. However, North America and EMEA together sent 57 percent of spam messages in December 2009, compared with 50 percent in November 2009.
  • With respect to the average size of the messages, the 2kb – 5kb message size category increased by seven percent, while the 5kb – 10kb message size category decreased by six percent in December 2009.
  • With respect to all spam categories, health and product spam have increased and now account for 52 percent of all spam messages.

Click here to download the January 2010 State of Spam Report, which highlights the following trends:

  • Xmas Card, Loaded with Malware
  • Your Bank Has Declared Bankruptcy
  • Pills From Amazon?
  • December 2009: Spam Subject Line Analysis
  • “Dotted Quad” Spam Shows Sign of Eruption
  • Andy Lau Talks Chinese Invoice Spam

In addition, the January 2010 State of Phishing Report has also been made available here and highlights the following trends:

  • Symantec observed a four percent decrease from the previous month in all phishing attacks.
  • Twenty-one percent of phishing URLs were generated using phishing toolkits; a decrease of 19 percent from the previous month.
  • A 26 percent decrease from the previous month was observed in non-English phishing sites.
  • More than 118 Web hosting services were used, which accounted for 11 percent of all phishing attacks; an increase of two percent in total Web host URLs when compared to the previous month.