Spam has reached a high not seen since September 2007, according to the latest intelligence collated by MessageLabs which has also found evidence of the re-emergence of image spam, emails containing attachments such as .gif or .jpg that contained the unwanted content.
In its April 2009 report the secure email services provider notes that spam has increased almost 10% in one month.
The number of malicious websites tracked continues to rise, with April statistics highlighting an increase of 27.3%, with 3,561 new malicious websites stopped on average each day.
MessageLabs said this is due to a series of threats including drive-by Trojan malware, Trojans hidden inside PDF files, malware disguised as .gif’s, and malicious IFRAME HTML tags.
The global ratio of email-borne viruses in email traffic from new and previously unknown bad sources was one in 305 emails, which is actually slightly lower than earlier figures.
Around one in every 400 emails now comprise some form of phishing attack, which also slowly nudged downwards against previous levels.