By the looks of a recently published Symantec report, spammers are probably keeping better correspondence with you than even your boss or your mother. According to a report released by the Internet security and anti-virus company Symantec, spam mail now make up for 90.4% of all e-mail. That means 1 out of every 1.1 e-mails are junk mail—just like the junk mail people get from regular snail mail, it would seem. This also means that spam has increased up to 5.1% from last month to this month.

The May 2009 security report of Symantec's MessageLabs Intelligence discloses many other disconcerting developments as well. Cyber criminals are now changing their usual modus operandi of hijacking infamous websites and are instead favoring older and reputable domains to house their malware.

According to the report, 84.6% of all suspicious domains blocked for malware and dangerous content are more than twelve months old. In particular, one domain type that's now specifically susceptible to hacker threats is the kind housing social networks because most these sites' content is user-created. Simply put, the best nesting grounds for malware propagation nowadays are domains with a large amount of user traffic and are established enough to be certified as secure.

Paul Wood, the Symantec MessageLabs Intelligence senior analyst, states that this new trend in spamming follows the old trends quite closely. To wit, spammers are using widely trusted and hugely popular websites to host their malicious software the same way they relied on well-known webmail services and social networking environments to horde their spam content.

According to Wood, cyber terrorists nowadays have learned from past lessons where their newer sites setup solely to distribute malware and spam are more easily flagged as suspicious and thus get shutdown faster. These days, they're opting for trustworthy domains that they can compromise and takeover through SQL injection attacks than the newer domains that they used to flock.

The report also states that a user's location also determines when you're spammed. Because spamming is a global, 24/7 phenomenon right now, spammers now continuously spam different parts of the world in certain periods of time in accordance to the different time zones.

Americans get sent the most number of spam between 9:00 AM to 10:00 AM, and then the number plummets during the night. In contrast, Europeans get a continuous torrent of spam throughout the entire day, while Asia-Pacific countries get their spam alongside breakfast. U.S. working hours is the busiest time for spammers, the report reckons.

Ironically, spam levels had dropped for a short period of time in 2008 after several malware-hosting Internet providers were shutdown. However, spammers are now back and stronger than ever, easily recouping their losses and rebuilding their networks.