Personalised Spam On The Increase

We've all received block emails telling us about the benefits of |/iagra, but with most email clients being built to deal with these spam mails, spammers are employing new technology specifically to bypass it.

"Spear Phishing" as it's called, works by personalizing the spam for you. Using a similar technology to Google ads and Amazon's recommendations, the spam-bot looks for significant keywords that you use and targets the spam to those words, therefore avoiding most of the anti-spam bots.

According to Cisco Systems, nearly 200 billion spam messages a day were sent in 2008, some including malaware as well as the usual range of chainletters, 419's and hyperlinks. That's double 2007's attacks.

"Spear Phishing" may still be low key, but even at 0.4% (up from 0.1% last year), that's still 800 million messages.

Now if we could only get details on how many succeed.

Source: USA Today

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One can only admire their dedication to selling people viagra, pain killers, and asking me for my bank account information.

Actually I've just had a wave of these. Business proposals from nigeria and swiss lottery things. I'll have to change my filter then I guess.

wait.. what exactly is catching these keywords and where are we typing them in at?

I get about 5 of these emails a day on my work email and every single one of them uses that \/iar.ga wording. Yoour wifee wiill be stupeifed by yoour maan's poweSruper Viarga.

That sentence took me forever to type. It's kinda hard to force yourself to mispell stuff so badly.

I've noticed the spambots around here are becoming more intelligent as well.

It's as if the machines are rising against us, but instead of blood, they want to sell us things.

Nurb:
wait.. what exactly is catching these keywords and where are we typing them in at?

My guess would be spyware, tracking your browsing history/google searches/etc and then grabbing your E-Mail address when you sign in. Just my theory though.