In the Fight Against Junk E-mail, the End User is the Prime Target

Deploying technologies such as anti virus protection, spam filters, web proxies, and firewalls, corporations continuously try to protect information and data assets.  Spammers continuously make it difficult by always updating and broadening the complexity, footprints, and large amount of spam they broadcast, so maintaining pace with the recent security updates, exploits, and scams involves nonstop effort.  Many spam blockers are unable to keep up with the many variants of email threats.  A rising percentage of these are holding no damaging payload themselves (thus bypassing email security that relies on malware signatures), but attempt to bait users to web sites that are capable of "drive-by" infections.  Put Differently, only visiting one of these sites can infect a user’s system.  Promises of free music, cell tones, software, or movies provide incentives to visit these sites.

Individuals are more attracted to the links, and more likely to click them, because they are being enticed by basic human traits by the attackers, like wanting to get something for free, curiousity, and even lust.  The confidence in the level of corporate security against spyware and other forms of malware is raising, which is the fundamental cause of this.  This "wetware," as spammers and other malware creators call it, is leading to them raising the social aspects of their assaults in order to take advantage of advances in social networking web sites.  To fight against this new kind of spam, businesses must mix technology with clearly expressed policies to deal with unsolicited commercial email. 

End users who are well-informed will help stop the security risked posed by "wetware".  Attacking the human component of security measures by mailing deceptive e-mails is usually called phishing.   When the assailant has any basic info on the victim, these assaults are very targeted and effective, these attacks are usually called spear phishing.