The name of ABC's Sunday night hit, Desperate Housewives, didn't take all that long to become a favorite lure of porn spammers, according to a new spam study from content security company Clearswift.
The company's new Spam Index said spam purported from "desperate housewives" but sending the gullible that click on the links to porn sites has helped sex-related spam increase 180 percent over the past month.
At first, Clearswift said, the spam using the lure to those sites seemed tied to swinger sites, but a closer investigation discovered the "desperate housewives" spam tied to porn sites hosted in Russia and China.
Ironically, this news comes with China well enough along in a nationwide crackdown on online porn and other "unhealthy" Websites across the Communist country.
"Aside from the fact that these emails are bogus," said Clearswift research director Alyn Hockey, announcing the new report, "clicking on any link within a spam mail can lead to a whole host of unwanted problems. They frequently contain malicious programs including spyware or rogue internet dialers which can run up huge unexpected bills."
Other lures spammers have been using for porn sites in the past twenty months, Hockey said, include offers of highly paid adult entertainment careers or helping to set up and run profitable porn sites.
On the other hand, Clearswift said, "the incredible array of bizarre products" turning up in spam messages after the Christmas holiday season has "completely dried up," including dog translators and devices turning coffee tables into kennels.
Even with that, however, direct products spam remained a steady presence in the past month, falling only to a small degree, from over 17 percent to over 14 percent, while software is now accounting for over three-quarters of direct products and 12 percent of all spam.
And spam purporting to sell Rolex luxury wristwatches, which became a flood in its own right over the second half of 2004, has all but vanished, Clearswift said. Rolex-related spam hit a peak in October 2004 but leveled off in November and began a near-complete disappearance.
