According to Amanda Grady, Symantec's principal anti-spam analyst, there has been continued trend towards exploiting natural disasters with a high volume of spam and phishing linked to the Haiti and Chile earthquakes.

Overall, says Symantec, phishing attacks increased by 16% in March compared to February.

The veteran IT security vendor notes that there have been several global product recalls from multiple car manufacturers recently, which spammers have sought to exploit.

"The British media have extensively covered the recent recalls from automotive manufacturers in the news", said Grady.

"The interest from the public has been noticed by spammers who are tailoring phishing emails to benefit from the fear of car defects leading to accidents", she added.

"By offering a 'free private case evaluation' and taking advantage of 'sudden acceleration danger' spammers are instead collecting personal details for malicious use", she noted.

Delving into the Symantec state of spam and phishing report reveals that spam from China's (.cn) URLs are on the decline, although Russian (.ru) spam, is on the rise.

During the February/March time span, Symantec reports a 12% rise in phishing attacks from non-English sites, with a number of attacks on Italian and French banks.