Well, it was fun while it lasted, "it" being a call earlier this year that porn spam – you know, that which "urinates in the well we all drink from," as noted First Amendment and adult Internet attorney J.D. Obenberger phrased it so memorably last year – was actually on the downslope. That was in March. Now, it's up again – by almost 350 percent since June, according to content security company Clearswift's latest index.
Don't be alarmed just yet, however: the Clearswift index said porn spam accounted for only 17.2 percent of July's monthly spam breakdown, with health care spam by far the largest volume of spam at 41.4 percent of it. In fact, Clearswift said, you could think of it in terms of a little cause-and-effect: the porn spam went up and so did the Viagra spam, which they think accounted for most of the health care spam in the period reported.
Clearswift said they think the months of quiet before the June balloon might well have been because spammers were taking their time developing and timing their messages, particularly with porn spam ramping up almost as a summertime tradition, in order to match the porn spam with the, ahem, appropriate health spam.
But porn being such a small volume of all spam – it was tied with financial-oriented spam at that 17.2 percent level – isn't exactly going to comfort businesses having to deal with the stuff getting into their e-mail networks, Clearswift said. Especially when enough of all kinds of spam, porn and otherwise, still travels with viruses, worms, and other malware attached or hidden within links.
“Companies can find their reputations compromised by the infiltration of pornographic email, especially when it’s not managed effectively,” said Clearswift director of research Alyn Hockey, announcing the new findings. “In addition to the obvious offence these images can cause, a large percentage of these e-mails attempt to dupe users into opening viruses that are maliciously hidden within Web links or zipped attachments.”
Pfizer, which makes Viagra, recently launched a legal campaign against spammers touting likely counterfeit versions of the drug through e-mail and Websites. The drug maker said recent research they have conducted showed 25 percent of men they polled believe Pfizer itself was sending the Viagra spam.
