The January State of Spam report shows that as 2007 ended, spam surged and accounted for 75 percent of all email, increasing to 83 percent in the last few days leading up to the holiday season. The December State of Spam report had showed that 72% of email traffic was spam.

Spammers changed their techniques for the holidays by inserting seasonal oriented keywords into URLs, subject lines, and embedded images within their messages. The objective here was to implant the holiday spirit into the readers' minds and provide blatant gift-giving ideas. No, there were no guessing games here as to what the spammers wanted to sell you for the gift giving season. The hot items Symantec observed were gift cards, electronics, replica products, and the ever present cheap drugs. Symantec observed an estimated 93 million spam messages focused on the holiday season during December.

Other highlights noticed in December and described in detail in the January State of Spam Report are:

• 419 spammers change their approach.
• Spammers deliver malicious content.
• Spammers leverage the US presidential primaries to collect personal information.
• Rise of the Chinese Blogs.

To read more and view samples of what was observed in December please see the January State of Spam Report.