This is really hot news! As it seems, many users got free pictures of Angelina Jolie naked, without even asking for them. Some people would really appreciate if they got naked pictures of good looking women in their inboxes, but this is not the case. It's all about a wave of spam that used nude Angelina pictures to trick people into getting a virus. I just got a hold of Sophos figures that show what were the fluctuations and evolution of the Internet in September; plus, what were the threats, who hosted the malware and what spammers used in their schemes - you can find it all in this article.

Well, getting back to the Angelina thing - it was a really clever scheme: basically, spammers would send out lots and lots of messages with a .zip attachment. The e-mail some got stated that the attachment is a picture with Angelina Jolie… naked, of course. Other celebs have been used in similar campaigns too, so this is just one of those recipes that work, even though they are old. Of course, downloading the zipped file will get you infected - these e-mails contain a malicious payload that would allow a malicious user to take control of the victim's computer, as Sophos informs. Bottom line, no matter how much you like a celeb, do not download nude-celeb-related attachments in spam e-mails!

The worst e-mail based threats (for September) were: Netsky in first place, then Pushdo (the Trojan that was related to the Angelina pics) came in second, while Mytob ranked third. "The Pushdo Trojan has been spammed out every Wednesday since March 2007 using a variety of enticing disguises, but lately, the cybercriminals have stepped up a gear and begun to spam innocent computer users at any time and on any day of the week", said Carole Theriault, senior security consultant at Sophos.

In addition, when it comes to web threats…things don't look too well there either. A lot of sites have the Mal/Iframe (a malicious HTML file that attempts to run malicious flies) issue. Almost 60% of the infected webpages were Iframe cases! Second most spread web threat is Mal/ObfSJ-A that spread via web browsing and drops more malware or downloads code from the Internet. That accounted for only 17% of infected sites, while Troj/Decdec (a Trojan that also drops malware or downloads code) with a puny 3% of infections ranked third.

But when it comes to malware hosting, nobody can take away China's cup! They're still ranked first, hosting 54.9% of all the malware in the world! The US comes in second with only 17% while Russia ranks third.

Then, there are a lot of hoaxes and scams, and of so many types that 61% could not be classified, thus dubbed "other" by Sophos experts. In any case, out of the ones that could be categorized, the "A virtual card for you" hoax ranked first, while the "Olympic Torch" and the "Hotmail Hoax" came in second and third.

After reading all this, it's clear that things don't look too well. The only smart decision in this case is to deploy security measures and stay safe!