A new report on the state of the net for the first half of 2008 has found that text based spam is increasing in popularity again. 70% of all spam sent over the last 6 months was text spam, compared to 20% at the same time last year. Image based spam is decreasing sharply, accounting for only 3% of spam sent compared to a whopping 60% last year.

Most text based spam is hawks shady pharmacies and quack drugs, penny stock scams porn, loans and more. Here’s the top 10:

Drugs
Replica Watches
Phishing
Pirated Software
Pornography
Loans
Hire & Equipment
Trojans’ Spread (tool for)
Dating
Diplomas

eBay and Paypal are the top phishing targets, but almost every large bank has found itself being used as a phishing target at one time or another, with 50% of all phishing imvolves US financial institutions.

As far as spam delivering malware goes, 80% of them are Trojans, with various viruses making up the rest. The Trojans almost always steal personal info and/or add the infected PC to a botnet-and bad news for Microsoft-one third of all malware exploits their Windows OS. Here’s the top 10:

Trojan.Clicker.CM
Trojan.Downloader.WMA.Wimad.N
Trojan.Autorun.EU
Trojan.FakeAlert.PP
Trojan.Peed.Gen
Trojan.Qhost.AKR
Trojan.HTML.Zlob.W
Packer.Malware.NSAnti.K
Trojan.Downloader.SWF.Gida.A
Exploit.Win32.Mso5-002.Gen

What does the rest of 2008 hold? We’ll have to wait and see, but since spammers, scammers and malware authors seem to thrive on the challenges spam filters, security programs, and blacklists provide, I’m sure we “ain’t seen nothin yet”!