Over the last twelve months, AppRiver quarantined more than 38 billion spam messages, almost double the amount quarantined just two years ago. Of that total, 450 million messages contained viruses. To make things even worse, phishing techniques showed increasing sophistication and are likely to be ever-present during this year. Also, the ZeuS botnet remains highly dangerous as it continues to target financial information while social networking sites continue to be the prime locations for cyber criminals to prey on the naive and unsuspecting.
If these scammers spent as much time figuring out ways of offering useful services as they do figuring out ways to swindle people out of their money, they’d probably make a nice living for themselves and stay on the right side of the law in the process.
It’s tempting to think that those who Succumb to these frauds are idiots. 419 scams, free and unsolicited pornography, mortgages, viagra etc and it wont happen to me.
However, you do sometimes see one that makes you think – that’s cleaver and you wouldn’t need to be such a fool, just clumsy or a little less knowledgeable.
I would suggest that the correct way of conveying a more accurate message is to say that “450 million of them contained Windows viruses”. IMO this puts the message in a more illuminating light.
The rate of new Windows viruses appearing was apparently more than a million new windows viruses in the first half of 2010:
http://spamnews.com/The-News/Latest/First-Half-of-2010-Records-More…
(AFAIK this trend continued, so 2 million new Windows viruses first appeared in 2010).
Apparently when an investigation is performed, up to a half of Windows PCs inspected are compromised by malware of one kind or another.
It seems to me that Windows security is soon likely to break completely under the strain. How can anti-malware scanners and software updates possibly keep up with all this?
You’re obsessed. Seek help.