About 90 percent of all email is spam
January 7, 2009 Computer Safety Tip
Armies of hijacked computers are flooding the world with spam as hackers devise polished ways to take over unwitting people’s 
machines.
Virus-infected computers are woven into “botnets” used to attack more machines and to send erroneous sales pitches to email addresses in low-cost quests to deceive readers out of cash.
Junk email referred to as spam accounts for nearly 200 billion messages daily, approximately 90 percent of email worldwide.
This year, botnets were used to inject a range of legitimate Websites with an IFrames malicious code that re-routes visitors to websites that download computer viruses into their computer systems.
Using malware to infect someone’s computers is an incredibly ordinary mechanism and harnessing them all together is a way they do their click fraud, spam emails, and data stealing.
As computer security vendors get better at protecting machines from hackers and users grow wary of clicking on unsolicited Web links or email attachments, online criminals are turning botnets on Web-based email accounts.
Hackers are “reputation hijacking” by using botnets to figure out weak passwords protecting Web-based email accounts. Weak passwords consist of family names, birthdays, home addresses, or other terms considered relatively easy to assume.
Once access is gained to legitimate email accounts, a plethora of spam messages sent are sent in the owners’ names.
