Now that the election's over, holiday season spam begins

Spammers have unsurprisingly launched their 2008 holiday season spam campaign using email to tout pharmaceutical products and casino spam with a Christmas angle.

In its November State of Spam report released today Symantec found that spam levels averaged 76.4 percent of all messages scanned by Symantec during October.

The figure represents a year on year increase of nearly six percent.

Of the spam messages, the economy, the US Presidential Election and holiday greetings were regularly used as email subject lines to attract users to click and in some cases wire money to cybercriminals.

Image spam increased to 9 percent in October 2008 compared to two percent of all spam in September. Previously, image spam reached a peak of 52 percent of all spam in January 2007.

Majority of spam continues to come from the US at 29 percent with eight percent coming from Turkey. Russia was found to have sent 7 percent. India and China both were found to send four percent off all spam send in October.