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
Published: Dec 18, 2008 03:33 pm