The explosion in the use of sites like MySpace, along with online and mobile phone text-messaging services and blogs, has lead to an increase in the number of marketers and spammers who are targeting these new channels.
With genuine online marketers always looking for new means of targeting potential clients, and spammers trying to bypass anti-spam filters, the social networking phenomenon has provided an ideal hunting ground.
According to the latest MessageLabs Intelligence Report, unwanted spam communication for June, made up 64.8 percent of global e-mail traffic, making an increase of 6.9 percent compared with the previous month.
One of the reasons for this growth is partly due to the fact that existing anti-spam measures have grown up around protecting customers from email spam, and that the online search companies such as Google continuously police their search results to increase their relevancy for users by aggressively targeting and removing spam sites wherever possible. The same level of protection has not however so far evolved for these newer forms of communication.
The other important reason is the level of specific market targeting that can be carried out on users of the social networking sites.
Mark Sunner, chief technical officer at MessageLabs commented that sights like MySpace allow for, "a new level of convergence and capability to profile people".
Social network sites, by allowing users to post their own profiles including certain personal information, interests, images, musical preferences, etc, and create networks of links with other users with similar interests, has been seen as an obvious target for abuse, as well as a dream come true for spammers looking to profile and target specific groups.
Amongst the main spammer tools seem to be the ubiquitous white text on a white background to hide content, fake online surveys, and many other social search specific techniques to by pass the antispam measures already put in place by MySpace and other sites, to more effectively target recipients based on their age, location and other personal characteristics.
"Spam is an arms race", stated Google executive, Douglas Merrill, "Spammers are highly motivated. There is a lot of money at stake."
While Google's primary focus remains on its core search facilities, they are continually introducing a host of additional projects and beta services, and have announced several future plans including better search for mobile phones, more personalised search results and continued efforts at combating all types of web spam.
MessageLabs, however, expects to see a growth in the possibilities for crossover by spammers between different protocols, helped as the services provided by the likes of Google increasingly require different platforms to be able to communicate with each other.
