Spammers are getting craftier by the minute. From pretending to be your best friend to the alluring promise of cheap Viagra, it seems that they have unlimited means for fooling people into opening spam e-mails.

As it turns out, Canada is now a favourite among spammers.

Due to the booming industry of online-Canadian pharmacies selling their product south of the border, "Canadian online drugstore” is the second-most used subject line for spam e-mails, right behind "Re: hi.”

Such is the information released by IBM Internet Security Systems’ X-Force research team. The report’s main focus is to determine the increase in exploited software vulnerabilities over the last year.

As it turns out spam and other vulnerabilities rose almost 40 per cent since 2005. According to Jordan Kalpin, Canadian Regional Director for IBM ISS, "high impact” vulnerabilities have dropped over the last year but these numbers are still alarming for Canadians.

"In terms of the total amount of e-mail traffic on the Internet, Canada and the U.S. are the worst for percentage of spam,” Kalpin said. "77 per cent of the e-mail traffic in Canada and the U.S. is spam. So it’s a huge problem and it continues to be a huge problem despite any legislation passed. All spammers need to do is just locate somewhere offshore where that legislation doesn’t exist."

Kalpin attributes the increase in spam to hackers flexing their creative muscles, thinking of new and innovative ways to infect computers. One of which is image-based spam, where code is attached to aspects of a graphic.

"There’s been a huge flood of picture-based spam,” Kalpin said. "The anti-spam people got smart and they started scanning the picture, but then the spammers started doing all kinds of crazy things to it.”

This can include such methods as attaching malicious code to colours and shades in an image. Many types of anti-spam software are unable to read the difference between certain colours, such as shades of light blue and light pink.

Kalpin said the last few years have shown that there is potentially big money in the spamming game.

"The people who are responsible for hacking and creating malicious code are no longer doing it as a hobby,” he said. "They’re actually doing it as a big business to make lots of money. So it’s becoming a commercial enterprise, albeit an illegal one.

"They’re actually developing code that’s very refined looking. It looks as good as any application from any of the big software suppliers out there and it comes with help files and pull-down menus to make it as easy as possible for people to use. They’re selling it to the highest bidder – organized crime, hacking organizations, terrorist organizations, to anybody who wants to extort or be a nuisance. So they have distribution channels just like a business would.”

According to the report, the problem has yet to reach its peak. For Canadians, this could mean a lot of headache.

"Canadians are as vulnerable as anywhere else,” Kalpin said. "Sometimes we like to think that we’re not the U.S., so we’re not vulnerable. But because of this online world that we live in, we are as vulnerable, if not more vulnerable than the U.S. Since the U.S. is such a target, they have made more investments in security, whereas we’ve lagged a little bit.”

Kalpin said it is important to have solid anti-virus and security features on a computer, but education is equally important.

"Home users have got to have really solid anti-virus and security packages on their computers and they need to scan their computers on a regular basis. They also need to educate their families on what they should do and what they shouldn’t do on the Internet.”