Happy New Year! 2009 is expected to be a year of more spam challenges and new sophisticated spamming techniques from spammers. Now that the Presidential Election is over we can put the Election Spam to rest, but  thanks to the economy, an increase in targeting the down and out, the tax-rebate-hopeful and the naive pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps market is expected.

According to spam experts, the next few months will be very telling as to how many and how advanced spam and phishing will be in 2009. Spam and Phishing are expected to target taxpayers who are expecting both tax refunds and tax relief under President Obama’s proposed stimulus package. Since out tax system does involved the process of collecting personal data, tax time can be tricky for the technology and Internet naive as they may fall victim to professional looking Phishing sites or authentic looking spam emails.

With the jobless rate rising, an increase in spam targeting the unemployed is also expected. Recipients should be wary of mail offering low-cost diplomas and certifications, home-business scams, and also of offers of credit or debt help.

We have also observed that spammers are continuing to piggyback on legitimate newsletters and using the reputation of major social networking sites to try and deliver spam messages into recipients? inboxes. The social networking spam messages were carefully crafted to closely mimic the legitimate notification emails often distributed from social networking sites.

As always we recommend having up-to-date Anti-Virus software on all local computers and on your mail server as well. We also recommend implementing a Business Enterprise Email Solutions that provide an avenue of protection from Spam, Phishing and Blacklists: