About a quarter of all spams come as an attachment,
according to a study bysecurity supplier
Marshal.
While the sophistication of spamming remains low at the moment,
if the spammers'
social engineering skills improve, Britain could face a
security crisis as harmful spam causes havoc, warned Ed Rowley,
Marshal's head of technical sales.
"When spam senders improve their social engineering skills and
they know enough about their targets to write an enticing or
convincing e-mail top line, they could net many more victims," he
warned. "This is what is known as
spear
phishing. They know enough about you to attach a convincing
looking document - like an invoice relevant to your business - and
you are suckered in."
Marshal reported today that spam containing attached PDF, Excel,
Text and Zip files now represents almost 25% of all spam, which has
surged up from 2% last week. Meanwhile the previously dominant
Image Spam has reached a 12-month low of just 6% of all
spam.
"Spam senders have to constantly evolve their forms. It will not
be long before they evolve to make their intros look more genuine,"
he warned.