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Spam is rising as we get closer to the Christmas holiday season according to Symantec, although they do say that phishing is down. The company has shared some findings from its September State of Phishing report.

According to the report, there was a 45% reduction in phishing attacks between July and August. Symantec says this will likely be a short-term lull, however, reflecting the end of a particular toolkit attack on social networking sites.

Symantec also anticipates an increase in holiday spam campaigns as spammers take advantage of not only the Christmas holiday season, but even sooner with Halloween. Other key findings from Symantec’s report show: 

- Financial and e-commerce brands continue to top the most targeted list, attracting 19.7% and 29.3% of the attacks respectively

- An increase in attacks using a popular email client application. The phishing scam messages lure the intended victims to re-configure their email client application by a link provided in the email

- An 11% rise in non-English phishing site attacks, with phishing attacks in French, Italian and Chinese languages found to be higher in August. French language attacks continued to be in the top position

The full report can be found here (pdf). You can see the global distribution of phishing sites.

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