Email has always been one of the favorite attack vectors of hackers, some useful tips in this article...

The recent success authorities have had in taking down dangerous botnets has helped drive down the amount of spam flooding into business and consumer email accounts. In a report on security in 2011 released late last year, Cisco Systems found a “steep decline” in the volume of spam since August 2010, with the number of spam messages falling from 379 billion a day to 124 billion. And the picture was pretty good in the United States, which dropped from being the No. 1 source for spam in 2010 to No. 9 in 2011, according to Cisco. The amount of money generated annually from spam also was cut in half, dropping to about $500 million. However, that doesn’t mean that the security threat from spam is disappearing. According to a survey released in March by GFI Software, almost half of the U.S. businesses responding to the survey said they had experienced data breaches due to employees clicking on malicious emails, and 70 percent said their anti-spam solutions are marginally effective at best. Forty-four percent of respondents said their organizations had sustained a data breach due to spam email, 52 percent said the volume of spam flowing into their organizations had grown over the past year, and 32 percent said it remained the same. Seventy-two percent of respondents said they receive too much spam. So what can business workers do to protect themselves against malicious and dangerous emails? eWEEK has assembled a few ideas here that security professionals and IT administrators can use as a checklist to help stop the next potential data breach.

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