Spammers and Botnets and Worms, Oh My!

A Cisco study confirms that the vast majority of communications on the Internet are total garbage and probably harmful for your computer's health.

Some nasty highlights from the Cisco Annual Security Report:

• spam accounts for nearly 200 billion messages each day, approximately 90 percent of worldwide e-mail. The USA is the biggest source, at 17.2 per cent.
• Targeted phishing attacks still represent just one per cent of total hacker threats, but is expected to rise as criminals personalize spam to improve their success rate (currently one in 12.5 million).
• More online criminals are using real e-mail accounts with large, legitimate Web mail providers to send spam.

Almost makes one nostalgic for the days when all you had to worry about were fraudulent telemarketers "giving away a free trip" in exchange for your credit card information.