"Personalized" spam, or messages tailored to individuals based on personal information stolen from the web, is on the rise, comprising more than 0.4% of all September attacks versus less than 0.1% a year ago.

As nearly 200 billion spam messages are sent each day, that means 800 million of them are targeted specifically to an individual, Cisco Systems found in its annual security study.

Some 90% of all emails sent worldwide are spam. And without protection (i.e., junk filters), the average web user can expect to get 70 spam messages each day, a McAfee survey reports.

Most spam gets caught in junk filters, but personalized spamming — also known as "spear fishing," often sneaks in because it contains pertinent subject matter and is sent in small dispatches, sometimes even from accounts at reputable web-based email services.

The messages, too, are more likely to be thought-out and may link to well-designed (albeit bogus) website that does not appear to be a threat for malicious program downloads or malware.

Anything a spammer does to increase the response rate on each email is extremely profitable due to the high volume of the attacks and virally-expanding network, computer scientists discovered last month.

New tricks of the trade are emails that try to get business owners to reveal the credentials on their Google advertising accounts, and personalized "whaling" emails directed to executives that say their businesses are under investigation by the FBI or that there's a problem with their bank account.

Text-message spam is also supposed to increase this year. US consumers are expected to receive about 1.5 billion spam text messages in 2008, up from 1.1 billion in '07 and 800 million in '06, according to Ferris Research (via The Seattle Times).