The security firm warned that, unlike during the summer months which can create misleading statistics on spam levels as the amount of legitimate email drops [Holidays = less work e-mail etc.], the latest rise is all due to additional spam.

Spam levels reached a record breaking 96 per cent in early October, supporting estimates that the trend over the whole month has been much higher than in the past two months.

Virus levels remained low during October, however, accounting for just 0.41 per cent of email scanned by SoftScan. Phishing still remains the predominant threat.