Spamming rises to 86 per cent of all emails: Websense

The threat landscape from emails is growing more sophisticated. In a threat brief, web security firm Websense said that in December 2009 alone.

A whopping 91.4 per cent of spam mails included an embedded URL.Websense says that ThreatSeeker anti virus stopped 55 thousand instances of 22 unique zero-day threats.

2.9 per cent of spam emails were phishing attacks.

Zero day attack, refers to exploitation by viruses, trojans or spyware of unpatched software vulnerabilities or any new and previously unknown computer virus threat that is released before security vendors can issue protection against them.

These malicious programmes attack by targeting vulnerabilities in operating systems and applications.

In December several major attacks in which hackers built their social-engineering campaigns around two main themes -1) the H1N1 scare, and 2) Facebook Password resets were sent to email recipients.