There has been a recent study that has found a concerning increase in the number of personalized spam.  Identity thieves create this kind of spam by using stolen lists of email addresses or data about their victims ( such as schools or banks used) that has been poached from online sources.

Traditional spam is typically blocked by email filters.  Personalized spam (known as “spear phishing”) often gets through filters.  This kind of email is also sent in smaller batches ad usually comes from accounts that thieves have set up with reputable Web-based email services.  These messages can also be very expertly crafted and often link to nicely designed web sites that are either bogus sites or contain malicious programs.

Approximately 200 billion spam messages are sent each day and this is roughly double the amount that was sent in 2007.

These targeted attacks are rising sharply as well.  Over 0.4 % of all spam sent in September were targeted attacks.  While this figure sounds low, consider this.  About 90% of all emails sent are spam.  This means that about 800 million messages are spear phishing messages.  One year ago less than 0.1% of spam messages were spear phishing messages.

In addition, the newest kind of attacks include text-message spam, emails directed to business owners trying to get them to provide credentials for advertising accounts, and personalized emails to executives telling them that their businesses are being investigated by the FBI or that there is a situation with a personal bank account.