9) Meet the new spam, same as the old spam

As in
life in general, if something works, you stick with it. How else to explain the
continued popularity and prevelance of e-mail based spam and phishing attacks,
even though everyone knows that e-mail is so “1998”?  Alas, the truth
is that attacks embedded as links or malicious attachments in e-mail messages
are a big threat this year, as they have been every holiday season since the
turn of the Millenium. Likewise, so-called phishing Web sites dressed up to
impersonate legitimate sites continue to be a problem for those
shopping online. As always: beware of links or attachments provided in
unsolicited e-mail. As for phishing attacks:  Web security firm Websense pointed
out that e-mail users have gotten better at spotting funky-looking domain. The
result: traditional phishing attacks are on the decline, while stealthy,
targeted attacks are on the rise. Fully 80% of the Websites serving malicious
code in 2010 were legitimate sites that had been compromised, the firm
reported, not bogus domains. Secure browsing plugins and sandboxing features
can help clue you in to suspicious or malicious Web sites, or block attacks from such sites that
may be used to push malicious programs to your machine or snarf sensitive details from insecure Web sessions.