Spam Spiked, then Slowed in February

The start of February saw Internet spam levels rise to as high as 79.5 percent of all e-mail messages due to a spike in botnet activity and spammers leveraging the financial crisis and Valentine's Day, according to MessageLabs.

This is despite the fact that spam levels declined by 1.3 per cent to an average of 73.3 percent for the same month, states the February 2009 MessageLabs Intelligence Report.

MessageLabs is now part of Symantec, a provider of security, storage and systems management solutions. MessageLabs Intelligence is a source of data and analysis for messaging security issues, trends and statistics.