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(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) – Data backup and security provider Symantec (www.symantec.com) released its May MessageLabs Intelligence Report on Tuesday that finds spammers are establishing their own fake URL-shortening services to redirect URLs.

Last week, UK Web host the UK2 Group named former MessageLabs CEO Adrian Chamberlain the non-executive director of the board.

According to the report, spam in May has increased by 2.9 percentage points from April.

Symantec says shortened links are disguised in spam emails as legitimate URL-shortened links, and then the URL leads to “a shortened-URL on the spammer’s fake URL-shortening website, which in turn redirects to the spammer’s own website.”

April’s report also recognized the increase of shortened URLs as a spamming activity known as click-fraud. 

“MessageLabs Intelligence has been monitoring the way that spammers abuse URL-shortening services for a number of years using a variety of different techniques so it was only a matter of time before a new technique appeared,” Paul Wood, MessageLabs Intelligence senior analyst said in a statement. “What is unique about the new URL-shortening sites is that the spammers are treating them as ‘stepping stones’ – a link between public URL-shortening services and the spammers’ own sites.”

According to the report, the new domains were registered several months before they were used “to evade detection by legitimate URL-shortening services.”

The report also finds that in the US 76.4 percent of email was spam. The UK and Canada had similar ratios. Russia was the most spammed in May with a spam rate of 82.2 percent.

Phishing activity in May decreased by 0.06 percentage points. The global ratio of email-borne viruses also dropped 0.143 percent, according to the report. Virus levels were one in 540.3 in the US.

The most spammed industry sector was the wholesale sector with a spam rate of 80.2 percent, and the public sector was the most targeted industry for malware with one in 28.9 emails blocked as malicious.