Cyber Crime Hits Big Time This Year

**TNT Bot** · Dec 23, 2006, 11:14pm

An anonymous reader writes to point out the Washington Post's analysis of this year's spike in junk email and online attacks, such as botnets and worms. Image-embedded spam emails made up an amazing percentage of all messages sent in the months of October and November, and something like four million bots are actively adding to that total. These botnets are also increasingly connected to organized crime, as are 'independent' hacker groups. The article goes on for three pages, and doesn't have a lot of hope that 2007 will look a whole lot better. From the article: "Experts worry that businesses will be slow to switch to the [Windows Vista]. And even if consumers rush to upgrade exiting machines or purchase new ones that include Vista, Microsoft will continue to battle security holes in legacy versions of Microsoft Office, which are expected to remain in widespread use for the next 5-10 years."

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Dec 23, 2006, 11:14pm	#1 (permalink) Cyber Crime Hits Big Time This Year
TNT Bot Elite Member Posts: 5,006 Karma:	An anonymous reader writes to point out the Washington Post's analysis of this year's spike in junk email and online attacks, such as botnets and worms. Image-embedded spam emails made up an amazing percentage of all messages sent in the months of October and November, and something like four million bots are actively adding to that total. These botnets are also increasingly connected to organized crime, as are 'independent' hacker groups. The article goes on for three pages, and doesn't have a lot of hope that 2007 will look a whole lot better. From the article: "Experts worry that businesses will be slow to switch to the [Windows Vista]. And even if consumers rush to upgrade exiting machines or purchase new ones that include Vista, Microsoft will continue to battle security holes in legacy versions of Microsoft Office, which are expected to remain in widespread use for the next 5-10 years." </img> More...