The number of e-mails carrying fake offers, concealing an attempted fraud, increased exponentially in May. Compared to the previous month, the increase is 226 percent, according to a study released by IBM.
In common this type of messages, which use different presentation schemes, aim to extract personal and confidential data from the user, which will later be used in fraud attempts, commonly known as attacks phishing.
IBM notes that in the same month the number of messages with viruses also grew, by around 33 percent, increasing to 3.12 the percentage of e-mails circulating on the Internet with viruses. As regards the spam The levels recorded in previous months were maintained. According to these figures, 68.7 percent of e-mail messages circulating on the Internet were spam.
The report explains that the increase in the number of viruses and fraud attempts is correlated, since the technique used by hackers to do this type of attacks is to launch viruses that take control of the affected machines (computers zombie) and serve as a projection platform for spam.
Related News:
2005-03-30 – Phishing attacks grow slightly in February
2005-03-10 – Phishing crimes carried out in Portugal increase substantially in 2004
