More than 90 percent of all e-mail sent online in October was unsolicited junk mail......Spam volumes monitored by Postini rose 73 percent in the past two months as spammers began embedding their messages in images to evade junk e-mail filters that search for particular words and phrases. In November, Postini's spam filters, used by many large companies, blocked 22 billion junk-mail messages, up from about 12 billion in September.....At any given time, between 3 million and 4 million compromised computers are active on the Internet, according to Gadi Evron....Botnets have become the moving force behind organized crime online, with a low-risk, high-profit calculation," Evron said. He estimated that organized criminals would earn about $2 billion this year through "phishing" scams, which involve the use of spam and fake Web sites to trick computer users into disclosing their financial and other personal data.......Another trend experts cite is the steady shift of Internet criminal activity from nights and weekends to weekdays, suggesting that online crime is evolving into a full-time profession for many......The past 12 months also brought a steep increase in the number of software vulnerabilities discovered by researchers and actively exploited by criminals.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/26/AR2006122600922.html
