“Spam has reached its highest level in years, according to the latest MessageLabs Intelligence Report on spam from Symantec. Spam levels are at their worst in France, Germany and the Netherlands, where they have topped 95 percent. In the U.S., it’s “only” 86 percent. MessageLabs researchers suspected the reason percentages are so high is because spammers are using automated translation services and templates to translate their snake oil into multiple languages.

Just three years ago, non-English spam represented 1 or 2 percent of the total spam floating around on the wires. More recently, non-English messages rose to 6 or 7 percent, and that was considered high. Now, the latest reports  that local language spam now accounts for 46 percent of spam in Germany, 53 percent in France, 25 percent in The Netherlands, 62.3 percent in Japan and 54.7 percent in China. Seemingly, spammers are now using templates to engineer this translation ‘on-the-fly,’” the report stated. “As the spam messages are being composed, they are able to change company names, domain names and other references as part of the automation process. The language for translation is suspected to be chosen based on the top-level country domain from the email address of the recipient; for example, an address ending in .fr may be translated into French, and .de into German.” (http://www.internetnews.com/security/article.php/3832276)

It has been said that URL shortening services are contributing to this huge increase in spam. A growing number of these services have been made all the more valuable by the popularity of Twitter and its 140 character limits. Because the services, like TinyURL.com or Bit.ly, work through redirects from links to their own site, the user can’t see the destination address. URL shortening is also becoming a dangerous breeding ground for malicious activity.