Internet fraudsters get smarter

Internet fraudsters are becoming more sophisticated, and fraudulent emails total more than 2% of spam traffic, according to Kaspersky Lab. “The quantity of fraudulent messages is striking, but so is the variety of social engineering techniques deployed,” adds the anti-virus company in its third quarter report for 2011. Kaspersky researchers warn that “new, more sophisticated methods” are being employed to get people to open mail with malicious attachments. One trick is to send apparently encrypted text and a malicious attachment. The fraudsters hope that users will choose to open the attachment in the hope of making sense of the unintelligible email.