The primary race in the United States, where the Democrats and Republicans have been sorting out their presidential nominees, has caused a huge rise in spam.
Symantec, the makers of anti-virus software products like Norton, first noticed references to the presidential election candidates in October last year when Ron Paul emerged as the first candidate being used by spammers.
Mr Paul was then followed last month by the first of the frontrunners when spammers began to circulate bogus links to Hillary Clinton videos cloaking a malicious Trojan.
Since then, URLs containing Hillary Clinton's name have also been used in pornography and Viagra spam.
Spammers have moved on to the remaining frontrunners. One spammer has cast a vote for Mike Huckabee, and Barack Obama and John McCain have had their names linked with ``portable dewrinkle machine'' spam, meds spam and get-rich-quick spam messages.
Symantec reported in its March report that Michael Jackson, Heather Mills, Indiana Jones and Mrs Clinton are being used by celebrity spammers.
One wants to revive a pop career, one is in the middle of a divorce with pop legend Sir Paul McCartney, one is a fictional character in a movie sequel and Mrs Clinton is locked in a contest to secure the Democrat nomination for president.
``They all have one more thing in common _ spammers are leveraging their celebrity names to circulate bogus, and often malicious, links to videos.''
The spam message enticed users to open the message with subject lines such as:
``Hillary Clinton's campaign yesterday struggled to convince Democrats she can deliver the strong wins.''
``Hizer Mills showed in a court video about heavy life with Maccartni''
``Michael Jakson glued up a person in plaster.''
``Hillari Clinton stood up for daughter!!!''
``The first roller is presented to the film ``Indiana Jons - 4.''
The links download suspect files ``mpg.exe'' which are Trojan downloaders. The downloaders install a file which is detected as Trojan.Srizbi.
Trojan.Srizbi was interesting with unusual features, Symantec said.
Once the Trojan was installed, it worked without any user mode payload and did everything from kernel-mode, including sending spam.
And spammers celebrated International Women's Day on March 8 by luring email users to their produces and services with catch subject lines such as ``Happy comming women's day''.
In March, health spam, which included pharmaceuticals, medical treatments and herbal remedies, made up 38% of all spam in the Asia-Pacific region, a whopping 30% increase since November when the figures were last reported. Globally, health spam makes up only 12% of the total.
The Internet and product categories in Asia-Pacific also differed significantly from the global percentages. Internet spam made up 13% in Asia Pacific compared with 23% globally and product spam made up 15% in Asia-Pacific compared with 26% globally.
Financial spam also dived by 26% from November to 7% in March.
Symantec reintroduced this month its Hall of Shame.
As economic conditions had slowed in recent months, Symantec said it had observed a torrent of spam messages encouraging users to ``refinance before its too late'', ``take out a mortgage for the lowest APR ever'' or ``this is the time to be the proud owner of your house''.
While the deluge of finance spam continued, spammers had also decided to diversify their sales portfolio to include the buying and selling of burial plots.
``Talk about an idea to get out from being buried. As the message indicates, the US national average price for a burial plot in 1978 was $US200 and this has risen to $US4500 in 2008.
``Get started, the advertisements say, because tomorrow could be too late.''
The site inducted into the Hall of Shame was called GraveGuru which claimed to be the best rated cemetery marketplace.
