An umbrella term for spam that goes beyond the early days of text email, which was the first type of spam. It generally refers to image spam, but spam delivered as instant messages and cellphone text messages may also fall into the category. Spam 2.0 also implies a dramatic increase in spam traffic, which began to escalate in the 2005-2006 time frame due to the use of botnets. See
spam account,
image spam and
botnet.