KEY POINTS:
Cyber junkmail has seen a dramatic increase in the past two months, filling inboxes more than ever before.
Internet security specialist Secure Computing's TrustedSource Lab observed spam increases this week that peaked at 53 per cent above July's daily average and 70 per cent above June's average.
Ads for Viagra, supposed offers of marriage from Russian models, African money scams, dubious stock tips claiming to make you more than Donald Trump - these are emails that most of us get every day.
The latest figures show that, as of this week, 88 percent of all email is spam, and it is estimated that it will swell to an all-time high of 90 percent in the coming month.
Spam fills inboxes, chokes servers and can literally opens up recipients' machines to intruders.
Secure Computing uses online "honeypots" around the world to continuously monitor malware (malicious software), viruses, trojans and worms that are being distributed.
Different types of net nasties can dig passwords or banking details from your system, or even give control of your computer to someone else thousands of kilometres away.
In recent years the style of spam being distributed has changed to become more effective.
Attachments like Acrobat 'pdfs' and Excel spreadsheets (.xls) now make up a huge amount of infectious internet nasties - 11 per cent of spam uses pdf attachments, which are more likely to be opened by unsuspecting users, and are proven extremely effective as carrier files for malicious code.
Fake greeting cards are another popular form of delivery - with links to websites that will automatically pump malware into PCs over the internet.
The Unsolicited Electronic Messages (UEM) Act 2007 will take effect from September 5, but as it can only prosecute spammers in New Zealand, it has no real teeth to deal with the global problem.
Secure Computing spokesman Eric Krieger says that the volume of spam will keep growing unchecked.
"The spam industry is morphing into a very lucrative business for organised crime," he told nzherald.co.nz today.
"A lot of groups are using the web combined with huge databases to distribute massive amounts of spam - and these are real brute force attacks."
Stolen databases of email addresses are formed and continuously updated by groups that in turn sell them on the black market. These can be bought for hundreds of dollars and give cybercriminals millions of addresses to spam. Even a 'hit rate' of less than 0.1 percent will help the groups make money.
Virtual networks of hijacked PCs, called botnets, are often leased by criminal groups to infect machines with less chance of being traced.
Most criminal groups are from Eastern European countries like Romania, where high levels of unemployment and a very computer literate population have attracted numerous large IT companies.
Wages are low in these countries, and as a result crime is a boom industry.
Computer skills are often considered a ticket out of the region, and this has created a massive, mobile and highly literate hacking community. Combine this with promises of huge money from crime syndicates and the spam industry flourishes, Krieger said.
He said it is the responsibility of internet service providers to stem the rising tide of spam.
"ISPs are often like banks," he explains, "they tend to be more reactive than proactive and won't take serious measures to block attacks until something bad happens.
"There's only one way to crack down on the amount of spam being sent and that's to get protection in place. They're not protecting their users - the web has morphed, you just need to look around to see that. And you can't defend against the organisations that are behind spam with a $100 internet filter programme."
Computer users trying to defend themselves against spam and its side-effects are recommended to use up-to-date virus and firewall software and to keep abreast of security updates for internet browsers and operating systems.
Treading carefully with filesharing systems is also advised, because spyware and malware can be contained in almost any file type imaginable.
But the most important piece of spam safety advice from the experts is: if you don't know the person who has sent an email, don't open it, and never, ever open unsolicited attachments.
