Taking advantage of holidays and events, spammers are increasing their attacks on e-mails with unsolicited bulk messages in Hong Kong.

The January 2012 Symantec Intelligence Report showed spam attacks are on the rise in Hong Kong with 67.5% of e-mails targeted.

Beginning on New Year's Eve and continuing over the following days, Symantec Intelligence identified spammers taking advantage of the recent New Year anniversary, seemingly to entice users into clicking on spam links contained in the e-mail messages.

"Following Valentine's Day, we also expect to see plenty of spam and malware taking advantage of the upcoming UEFA Euro 2012 football tournament, jointly hosted by Ukraine and Poland. Once UEFA Euro 2012 is over, it's not long until the Summer Olympics in London," said Harry Pun, Client Services Manager, North Asia for Symantec.cloud.

By relating their mails to widely-celebrated holidays and current events with global interest, spammers and malware authors can (at first glance at least) make their messages more interesting, and increase the chance of recipients visiting spam Web sites or becoming infected.

"With legitimate Web servers being exploited in many of these latest attacks, it is especially important to remain vigilant and ensure that businesses adhere to a best practice for patching and maintaining Web and other potentially vulnerable servers," Pun added.