Social engineering was the driving force behind spammers during the month of February. While overall spam volume hovered steadily at 78.5% of email and tactics remained relatively the same, the use of events, big brands, and public figures drove spam campaigns during the month. The March State of Spam report highlights several of these.

With the U.S. presidential elections just around the corner the candidates have turned their focus on each other, just as spammers have focused their campaigns on the candidates. The first example of this was spam leveraging Ron Paul back in October of 2007. Last month, spammers began to spread bogus links purporting to show a Hillary Clinton speech, but in actuality the links were cloaking a malicious Trojan. Most recently we’ve seen spammers leveraging the last remaining front-runners of the 2008 presidential elections; Obama, McCain, and Huckabee. Just what are spammers linking the candidates with? Everything from Viagra, porn, get-rich-quick schemes, and portable dewrinkle machines.

The presidential candidates aren’t the only targets. Also seen were high profile names such as Michael Jackson, Heather Mills, and Indiana Jones to name a few. Spammers are using these names to spread malicious links to videos and the names being circulated are all currently high profile. Who hasn’t heard of the McCartney/Mills divorce or Britney Spears’ woes? The spammer is banking that you want to know more about these celebrities and are therefore leveraging their names to tempt you into opening the malicious link. These are fairly easy to spot because in most cases the names are misspelled. I wonder what Paul McCartney would think of his name more closely resembling a martini (Maccartni)?

In addition to the above the March State of Spam report includes a regional highlight on the Asia-Pacific/Japan region (APJ). The report offers a close look at trends in the categories of spam seen as well as some interesting attacks targeting the region. Some of these highlights include:

• Health spam, which includes pharmaceuticals, medical treatments, and herbal remedies, currently makes up 38% of all spam in APJ—that’s a whopping 30% increase since November 2007 when the figures were last reported. Contrast this with the global percentage of health spam which is only 12%.

• The Internet and product categories in APJ also differ significantly from the global percentages. Internet spam makes up 13% in APJ compared with 23% globally and product spam makes up 15% in APJ compared with 26% globally.

• Financial spam has nosedived by 26% from November 2007 and now stands at 7%.

• High profile tactics involved the Chinese New Year snow storms, the Edison Chen sex scandal, and the Chinese version of the pump-and-dump stock scam.

To read more about the state of spam for March, to view previous monthly reports, or for additional resources on the current spam landscape, please visit Symantec’s State of Spam site.