Security vendor Marshal Ltd.'s Threat Research and Content Engineering (TRACE) team monitored spam traffic from spots located across 18 countries and recorded a 30 percent increase over the last week, which smashed global record levels.

Marshal Director of Product Management Bradley Anstis, said spam has increased a whopping 280 percent since last October.

"About 85 percent of e-mails received are now spam and this will go up to at least 90 percent by the end of the year if levels don't change," Anstis said, noting that spam represents eight out of every 10 e-mails.

"Spam coming out of China and South Korea has massively increased mainly because of out-of-control botnets running off unprotected home computers." He said many governments and users from these areas are ignorant of the need for anti-malware products, which allows botnets to proliferate.

"There is very little knowledge of the importance of malware protection and the lack of legislation means malware writers have a good chance of getting away with it. Singapore has toughened up on legislation and we have seen a drop in spam from there as a result," he said.