Until recently, the majority of spammers relied on messages selling male enlargement and sexual performance pills. However, the new trend appears to be promoting items such as inexpensive jewelry, knock-off watches and pens.

Marshal TRACE’s security researchers report that the recent increase in the sale of such products has finally broken the two-year abundance of health-related spam that has been flooding the inboxes of email users worldwide. Until recently, the sale of health products comprised approximately 75 to 80% of the total Internet spam. The emergence of product spam reveals how much the spam market has increased in terms of sophistication.

Bradley Anstis, Marshal’s Vice President of Products, explains that the significance of this new trend of spam that promotes software and jewelry products; it reveals an awareness on the part of the spammers regarding the purchasing patterns of customers and their preference for a certain type of product.

The percentage of health-related spam selling pharmaceutical products and herbal medicines has continued to decrease from 80 to 45% since January 2008. On the other hand, product spam promoting items such as replica clothing and watches and pirated software has increased from 12 to 46%.

Both types of spam comprise more than 90% of the total spam. This new trend has been initiated by a group of prominent spammers. Because they control such a large number of botnets, they are able to alter the worldwide preference for spam products.

Prominent botnets such as Srizbi, Pushdo and Mega-D feature in the latest trend of spam. Spammers use them to send remarkable amounts of spam promoting replica products, and the items reveal a surprisingly high rate of consistency. Spam goods are being promoted under brand names such as Herbal King, Canadian Pharmacy, Prestige Replicas and Exquisite Footwear.

Marshal believes that this current shift away from health-related spam to product spam reveals that spammers have recognized the trust felt by consumers for the new type of replica products being promoted.

Popular networking sites have become one of the latest targets in recent spam attacks. Cloudmark, an anti-spam enterprise, revealed that social networking sites have seen a huge rise in spam in the 6 months to March 2008. In fact, the company claims that nearly 30% of every new account is fake and designed to spam or cause problems for legitimate users.

Cloudmark’s vice president of marketing, JF Sullivan, that these social networking sites advertise the same type of spam that users receive via the mail and attract the same type of visitors. Unfortunately, many individuals trust the popular networking sites and don’t expect to receive spam.

According to security researchers, users on the social networking sites can be conned by receiving junk messages that appear to be sent by friends or acquaintances. Many of the spammers create profiles that feature photos of attractive women to lure unsuspecting members of these social networking sites. Once individuals add these spammers to their network or profile, the con artists have an easy way to send them all spam.

Sullivan also reports the every main social networking site is experiencing spam-related problems. In fact, many of the sites receive 15 to 30% spam. Pete Simpson, manager at ThreatLab, acknowledged that spammers often target these social networking sites because they can easily gain access to a large number of different users.

A recent anti-spam judgment of $230 million awarded in favor of MySpace reinforces the popularity of social networking site members becoming easy spam targets. Two spammers were punished for creating a phishing scam which involved obtaining login details from MySpace users in order to attack them with harmful sites and fake messages. MySpace received approximately 730,000 fake messages which are all believed to have originated from the same source.

It’s important that users of social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace become more aware of the possibility of spam attacks. This may reduce the number of attacks even more than by implementing technological solutions to fix the problem.