Though botnets have caused a large volume of junk email in recent months, security researchers are more alarmed at the rise in their level of sophistication, warning that targeted phishing attacks are making their way into corporate email servers. "They've reached a level of sophistication that we usually associate with commercial grade products," said Mark Sunner, chief security analyst at MessageLabs in New York. "We've seen the activity change and now botnets are spammed out in discrete chunks." In November, the global amount of spam in email traffic grew to nearly 90% of all global email traffic, according to statistics kept by MessageLabs. And that percentage is expected to hold in December. In addition, the vendor reported that 1 in 200 emails contained some type of phishing attack. MessageLabs said more than 68% of all malicious emails intercepted recently have been phishing attacks, a steady increase over the previous months.
Security researchers predict 2007 will be a year in which the level of sophisticated attacks grows to alarming levels. The bad guys are beginning to comb through social networking Web sites such as MySpace and others, said Sunner, and pull out addresses, zip codes and other identifying data to make a phishing email seem genuine to a victim.
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