Prepare to be assaulted! Now spammers are using emails to infiltrate the files in your PCs to spoil the data. A study by Sophos, a Mainz based information technology security firm that regularly monitors emails, finds that 92 percent of emails sent globally between January and March 2008 were spam.

Sophos, however, did not track the number of spams actually reaching the mailboxes of Internet users. The study conducted in the first quarter of 2008 found 23,300 new spam related Web pages everyday, or about one every three seconds, and unveiled the origin of spam mails. The U.S. remained in the top position of countries responsible for generating spam with 15.4 percent in the first quarter, followed by Russia accounting for 7.4 percent. In the past year the number of spam messages sent from compromised computers in Russia had more than doubled. In the first quarter of 2007 Russia relayed just three percent of the world’s spam.

Turkey tops the three offending countries sending spam, which accounted for 5.9 percent of the globe’s spam, compared to 3.8 percent in the fourth quarter of 2007. Moreover, an analyst at the Internet security company McAfee states that more than 530,000 instances of a single booby-trapped file have been spotted in just seven days. The analyst has tracked the villain file — a Trojan horse called Downloader-UA.h. It masquerades as a media file, and is responsible for thousands of fake MP3 music and MPG video files floating around online.

Companies providing data protection have rolled up their sleeves to shield against the criminals. The companies will keep on sharpening their armory to take on phishers and pharmers, but new methods in Internet fraud will keep on appearing and threatening the users.