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As if John McCain's selection of neophyte Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin to fill the second half of the Republican Party's presidential bill wasn't sensational enough, spammers proclaimed Paris Hilton as the unlikely running mate.

Aside from proclaiming ridiculous and false news in August, spammers were hard at work, trying their best to spread malware to Inboxes everywhere.

Their favoured method to lure e-mail recipients into clicking on sinister links was to refer to Internet-related goods and services, according to Cupertino, Calif.-based Symantec Corp.

The security vendor released its State of Spam report, covering the spam-o-sphere for the month of August. More than one-quarter of all spam messages referred to online services, an increase of nine per cent since June.

"It just really came home to us this month," says Dermot Harnett, editor of the monthly spam report at Symantec. "This is such a big increase, it is just shocking, it's a huge percentage increase."

Normally, not much changes in the spam world. But spammers have been putting effort into this new category of attack message, and it comes as a wake-up call, the security analyst says.

Spammers are trying to get around spam filters by linking to malware instead of attaching it to a message, the report says. That trend explains the rise in the number of messages referring to online services.

Overall, spam seems to hit a ceiling by accounting for eight out of every 10 e-mail messages. That statistic has been static for the last several months, but is higher than the 71 per cent of all e-mail one year ago.

"It's a huge number," Harnett says. "For it to increase much more, spammers would have to put a lot more effort into it."

Here's five messages that spammers thought might just slip past anti-spam filters and entice the recipients into installing a piece of malware.

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