Our mailboxes receive more than one email on a daily basis, which includes a PDF file attachment (according to the July spam report of the company Symantec. Up to that point 25 million PDF spam e-mails had already been sent.)

So, if up to now you used to receive 2-3 emails per day, suddenly everyday your mailbox hosts at least 30-40 messages among which you are obliged to find the ones in which you’re really interested.

In most of those spam e-mails the text is very limited (usually not existent at all) and there is a variety of subjects, so that identification by anti-spam filters becomes more difficult. PDF spam also is of a bigger size than ordinary text-spam and it might create serious problems to mailboxes with limited storage.

Moreover, over the last few months a wide circulation of e-cards spam seems to have taken place. These messages contain a link, on which one should click in order to see the e-card. Nevertheless by clicking the link, malware is installed on the recipient’s computer. A very common type of such malware is the “Storm” worm which appeared in January 2007. “Storm” when installed in a computer, has the ability to turn it into a computer-shadow. A computer-shadow sends millions of spam messages and attacks various websites without its owner even knowing it.

Last but not least we should mention spam e-mails which contain Zip and Excel attachments. According to an article published in the newspaper USA Today, spammers have begun to use popular online services such as Google news, placing advertising and misleading links among the news links sent daily to the subscribers of the service.

The Greek awareness node suggests that you never open e-mails from unknown senders. Even if you do open such an e-mail, you should never click on links and attachments. Greek-speakers can visit the website www.saferinternet.gr for further information.