There's been a new rise of email spam - heavily slanted toward "pump and dump" penny stock schemes. The funny part about this here at Cincom was that the rise coincided with a request by some of us that IT allow more mail through the spam filters, due to fears that some good mail was being lost. I guess we picked the wrong time to ask - eweek notes that the rise in such spam has been astounding:

Internet security researchers and law enforcement authorities have traced the operation to a well-organized hacking gang controlling a 70,000-strong peer-to-peer botnet seeded with the SpamThru Trojan.

...

According to data from Barracuda Networks, an enterprise security appliance vendor in Mountain View, Calif., there has been a 67 percent increase in overall spam volume and a 500 percent increase in image spam since Aug. 2006.

Some of the folks in our group have been grumbling about the specific spam filtering that IT is using - it looks like that just doesn't matter much - there's just a huge wave crashing down on mail servers everywhere right now.