Most of us know about phishing by now. Those annoying emails coming from a bank you don’t even do business with, telling you in poor grammar and spelling to update your account settings by visiting a website with a strange looking URL. The more clever ones, such as the genuine-looking messages posing as eBay or PayPal customer support, have lured many people into exposing their account credentials and still pose a significant threat to the uninformed.

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Just in case there has been any doubt, here is another example of how all electronic communications can be used in court. This eWeek article covers the recent subpoena issued by New York City, to obtain text-messaging records and recipient information related to protests during the Republican National Convention in July of 2004. The event was orchestrated through the now infamous TXTmob tool, which was created by Tad Hirsch, a doctorial candidate at MIT.

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Coincidently, a couple of days after I had posted the blog entry about spammers now targeting cell phones, I received a couple of unsolicited text messages. I don’t really use texting, since I have a Blackberry and prefer email and IM instead. Consequently I don’t subscribe to any texting plan. I had previously made a mental note to check what anti-spam tools my cell carrier - Verizon - had available to control the inbound text message stream. Now was a good time to follow-up on that.

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We all receive emails from automated services such as payment reminders, news alerts or other opt-in communications. The emails are computer-generated and the sender typically includes a notice asking the recipient not to reply to the message, since the sending account is not being monitored. Apparently, some companies go one step further and put an invalid return address in the message envelope.

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It was just a matter of time before spammers would try to exploit the fast growth of text- and email-enabled cell phones. The Washington Post picked up on the issue of text-message spam in this article earlier this week. While many of us are enjoying the benefits and convenience of BlackBerrys, iPhones and other SMS capable devices, scammers are already working hard on ways to get their unsolicited offers for questionable wares to our phones.

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Commtouch released yesterday its annual report on email threats and trends the company collected in 2007.

Not that we needed reminding, but spam now represents over 80% of all global email traffic, reaching a peak of over 95% in Q4 of last year.

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