Global spam levels hit an all time high of 95 percent of all emails during the third quarter according to a new report by Commtouch, "Email Threats Trend Report for the third quarter of 2007."

The report found that image spam decreased but new types of attachment spam like PDF and Excel spam increased. Pharmaceuticals and sexual enhancers were the most popular spam topics, at 30% and 23%, respectively.

According to Commtouch there is a growing threat of messages that look to be innocent but contain links to malicious Web sites, and accounted for 8 percent of all global email traffic during the peaks of various attacks during the quarter.

A number of blended spam attacks were geared toward leisure activities, including sports and video games. Messages asked users to download "fun" software such as NFL game-tracking and video games from what looked like official Web sites. Instead people downloaded malware onto their computers.

"Blended spam demonstrates the ingenuity of spammers to attempt to evade detection," said Amir Lev, Commtouch President and CTO. "Most anti-virus and anti-spam technologies are not capable of blocking these types of messages, so the malware threats are allowed to penetrate the users' computers."

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