But it is not only the sophistication of spam emails that has increased - it is their volume. After seeing spam levels plateau in 2005, anti-spam organisations hoped levels would start to drop or remain fairly constant - but this has not happened. The amount of emails has increased exponentially, with the US technology firm Postini detecting seven billion spam emails sent worldwide in the month of November this year, compared to 2.5 billion in June.You may have noticed the emails littered with long strings of rarely used or gibberish words. And although they may sometimes resemble post-modern poetry, they are in fact designed to get around email filters by including words that are not common commercial terms and thus fool the engine into thinking it must be an actual human user sending the mail. Image spam also deftly avoids email filters by including up to twenty-five tiny images into an email to bypass optical character-recognition technology. Phishing is the fastest growing form of spam, with new methods of phishing being developed all the time.
Worrying developments include the use of so-called "Vishing". This is a new technique whereby spammers first gain contact information via a regular phishing avenue and then immediately call the victim with a pre-recorded message asking for the security number of their card, or other personal details.
Vishing is vastly different and much more technically advanced than traditional telephone spam and is proving to be extremely successful, as people often reply without question. Generally, victims are much less sceptical of giving out details over the phone than on the internet, which may prove very dangerous - especially to less technically savvy people and pensioners who may not understand the risks.
Another emerging phenomenon is "spear phishing", where scammers watch company email lists for new arrivals and then send them a new email, purportedly from the IT department, asking for personal details for their personal file.
In the wake of the burgeoning development of spam and phising techniques, bigmouthmedia has a little piece of advice: the worst thing you can ever do is reply to the sender, give out your details to anyone who calls you or emails you asking for them, or click on a suspicious link. Whether it's search engine spam, email spam, telephone spam or anything else, we can guarantee the spam will get much worse if you respond to it.
