CYBERSPACE — While there’s no shortage of suspicious stock tips, for-sale diplomas, or dirt-cheap pharmaceuticals popping up in the in-boxes of Web users around the globe, web security and analytics firm Symantec reports that the percentage of spam classified as “adult” hit an all-time low last month.According to a monthly “State of Spam” report published by Symantec, adult materials comprised only 4-percent of the spam that passed through the Symantec Probe Network in the 90 day period that ended with the close of February.

The Symantec report defines adult email, or “Adult E-Mail Attacks,” as the report puts it, as spam “containing or referring to products or services intended for persons above the age of 18, often offensive or inappropriate,” and offers as examples “porn, personal ads, relationship advice.”

The Symantec report found that the leading spam category was “financial” spam (accounting for 25-percent of the total), followed by “health” and “products” (23-percent each). “Scams” and “fraud” are listed as separate categories in the report, accounting for 4-percent and 3-percent, respectively, of all spam during the 90 day period.

As to the difference between “scam” and “fraud” spam, Symantec defines “scam” spam as “attacks recognized as fraudulent, intentionally misguiding, or known to result in fraudulent activity on the part of the sender,” and provides as examples “Nigerian investment, pyramid schemes [and] chain letters.”

“Fraud” spam, on the other hand, is defined by Symantec as “attacks that appear to be from a well-known company, but are not. Also known as “brand spoofing” or “phishing,” these messages are often used to trick users into revealing personal information such as E-mail address, financial information and passwords.” Examples of this manner of spam cited in the Symantec report are “account notification, credit card verification [and] billing updates.”

Symantec’s Kelly Conley highlighted several other “interesting trends” from the February spam report in a blog entry on Symantec’s website.

“While spam continues to be a high percentage of all email, there was a slight reduction of spam in January to approximately 69 percent,” wrote Conley. “The technique du jour, image spam, reached a high in January, but ended the month around 30 percent. It’s amazing to think that 30 percent of the total spam volume is image spam. We look at it every day, and still it continues to arrive, most notably in emails for penny stock and fake Rolex.”

With regards to the method used in evaluating spam levels, Symantec states in the report that the “Worldwide Internet Mail Gateway Spam Percentage represents the number of messages that were processed and classified as spam versus the total number of messages processed when scanned at the mail gateway. This metric represents SMTP layer filtering and does not include the volumes of e-mail detected at the network layer.”

For more information, refer to Symantec’s latest “State of Spam” report, available on the Symantec website at the following URL: http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/reference/Symantec_Spam_Report_-_February_2007.pdf