Spam levels in Australia are going through the roof, increasing by two percent to 92.7 percent of all emails received by business, and higher than the global average.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority has hit two companies and a number of individuals with massive fines for luring unsuspecting customers of dating sites into expensive SMS sex chats with bogus persons. The penalty, handed down in the Federal Court of Brisbane, sounds a warning to spammers looking to cash in on the growing popularity of mobile phone chat services.

New botnets are reportedly causing more havoc on the Internet, with botnets now responsible for sending 87.9 percent of all spam, including one of the oldest and largest botnets which has doubled in size in just four months.

The adult industry has tapped into the increasing popularity of social networks, with a rapid rise in porn spam now bombarding sites like Twitter, Facebook and MySpace, and their subscribers, with everything from provocative images to hidden malware.

The use of automated phishing toolkits continues unabated, with the number of phishing URLs generated using the toolkits soaring to 63 percent in July, an increase of 150 percent.

According to Marshal8e6's TRACElabs weekly spam volumes have broken the record set in July 2008, and have risen 60 percent since the start of 2008 with spammers having learnt how to minimise disruptions to their operations caused by the shutting down of one of their major botnets.

Spammers and malicious code authors have created and launched several new spam and malware campaigns using the death of Michael Jackson as a cover for their infected emails.

Spammers have employed a new technique in their phishing attacks on the Australian Taxation Office website in an attempt to snatch tax refund details from users of the site doing their tax return online.

There’s been a huge rise in the use of shortened URLs by spammers which poses a greater security threat to Internet users, including those accessing popular social network sites like Twitter.

A staggering one billion malicious emails orginate from Australia every day of the week as spammers push out their emails to Internet users, enticing them to buy discounted pharmaceuticals, replica watches, greeting cards, or to sneak a peek at naked pictures of pop star Rhianna.