Spam tops 70 percent of e-mail

Spam in the form of HTML e-mail is still rampant, while PDF, image and e-card spam is on the decline, a new report finds.

According to Symantec's latest monthly spam report, spam accounted for 70 percent of all e-mail in September, which is 1 percent higher than the month before.

However, PDF spam, which saw a surge in August, dipped last month. Image and e-card spam volumes also fell. Image spam went from 10 percent of total spam in August to 7 percent in September.

While PDF, image and e-card spam has gone down in volume, text and HTML-based attacks "are still very much in the wild", the report noted.

To evade spam catchers, spammers are increasingly using JavaScript to hide URLs from spam filters.

According to Symantec, 400,000 JavaScript-embedded spam messages were observed in a one-week period in September.