Anti-spam researchers at security company McAfee have discovered a new spamming trend nicknamed "spam island-hopping". The new trend involves spammers using the domain names of small islands as website links in spam campaigns. McAfee has traced spam activity from the Isle of Man to the tiny tropical island of Tokelau in the South Pacific.
Traditionally, spammers have used well known top level domains such as dot-com, dot-biz or dot-info. By using top level domains from small island countries, spammers attempt to avoid detection by using domains that spam filters do not recognise accustomed as they are to blocking the well known domains.