Who is the most popular celeb spam-bait?

P.T. Barnum famously declared “There’s a sucker born every minute,” but even he couldn’t imagine this.

Secure Computing’s TrustedSource Research Team has issued its August 2008 report on all things spam, and among the stories: the top 10 celebrity names used in spam, designed to draw a response.

Secure Computing generated this list from two services it offers, Secure Web (Webwasher) and Secure Mail (IronMail) products, and correlated the e-mails against its global reputation system, TrustedSource.

Far and away the most popular name for bait was, perhaps not surprisingly, Angelina Jolie. On average, about 2.28 percent of the total global daily e-mail volume contains subjects like “Angelina Jolie naked,” “Angelina Jolie nude movie,” and “Angelina Jolie naked video.”

Yeah, there’s about a half-dozen of them at the local Blockbuster.

Secure Computing tracked back more than 100,000 unique IP addresses to the Angelina spam on the first day of the outbreak, which is apparently related to a new botnet infection.

The “Angelina Jolie” spam campaign contains a URL linked to an executable binary, most often with the filename msvideoc.exe, which is hosted at multiple domains. Secure Web determined it to be hosting a Trojan horse virus, big surprise.

For numbers 2 through 10 we have:

2) Barack Obama

3) Paris Hilton (who for once made a video worth watching.)

4) Britney Spears

5) Jessica Simpson (why, pray tell, is she famous? Give me three reasons and the first two don’t count.)

6) Hillary Clinton

7) George W. Bush

8) Osama Bin Laden (can I get a tracert on that IP address? I could use the $25 million reward)

9) Brad Pitt

10) Michael Jackson (wait, he actually works as bait?)