Sex related spam increased 180 percent in February, making up 18 percent of total emails analysed in security vendor Clearswift’s spam index.
Spam topics are cyclical and so it’s not surprising that we’ve seen the focus of spam return to pornography, Peter Croft, managing director at Clearswift Asia Pacific told iTnews.
According to a statement from Clearswift, the latest round of sex-related spam initially appeared to link to dating forums but actually linked to porn sites hosted in Russia and China.
"Spam claiming to offer details of women looking for casual sex are leading email recipients to pornographic websites," said Croft.
$11.7 billion has been spent by people responding to spam and with 20 to 50 billion spam messages being sent, the response doesn’t have to be very high, Croft said.
Services such as pornography and gambling are perfect for the web due to the secretive nature of the purchases, he added.
In the past six months spam topics have covered stock ramping schemes, sales of real and fake pharmaceuticals, and sales of fake rolex watches.
A new arrival was a phoney Sony PSP giveaway spam which Clearswift expects to become more prevalent in the coming weeks.