Mass e-mailing is no longer hip for hackers. Spam attacks are now yesterday’s news and have been replaced with targeted attacks. There are two predominant reasons for the switch: First, mass mailing malware is noisy and slow; it typically takes considerable time for an e-mail to work its way across the Internet. This global lag provides administrators with ample time to notify users and lock down the network to mitigate the attack.

Second, using a broad and unqualified e-mail address list may generate a few hits for a hacker–but for the most part it delivers lots of misses. Simply put, if the malware launcher wants to capture banking credentials with a key logger, he would be better served to only target users who have high balances in their bank accounts. Who launched that attack? | Tech News on ZDNet