Researchers and IT managers are confirming security vendors’ claims that spam levels have spiked in the past month – some say by as much as 80 % — and show no signs of decreasing.

“There are enormous amounts of spam; it’s shot up like crazy since the beginning of October,” says John Levine, president of consulting firm Taughannock Networks and co-chair of the Internet Research Task Force’s Anti-Spam Research Group, who operates a number of e-mail addresses that aren’t filtered for spam. “Earlier this year I was seeing about 50,000 spam messages a day, now I’m seeing 100,000.”

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