Google reports that Spam Viruses are on the rise in this report from eweek:
Spam Viruses on the Rise
And on that note I must say my mailbox is even more full of spam messages with attachments and the particularly spammed mailbox is on a bunch of social networking and job related web sites and a few user group mailing lists, and of course mailing lists like eweek and other Internet industry mailing lists.
Other than that I barely use that email address for communication anymore due to all the problems.
So is all this spam the result of putting my name on some social networking site somewhere?
As a matter of fact I tried out Facebook for a while just to see what all the hubbub was about and I got sent so many of these stupid applications and postings from friends that I just did not believe were legitimately from my friends. I would see that two random and unrelated people were challenged to a game, for instance or received a similar post and I started to wonder if some of those things were fake. I'm sure they were, but basically I never clicked on any of them (sorry all you facebook friends out there) because I know that these apps from random sites could contain things that are harmful to my computer and who knows what is in them or where they came from...and even the ones I did sign up for from bigger name software makers I wondered about.
So yeah, I really believe this and I wonder if the makers of some of the executive type social networking sites are actually using that information illegally - or those systems are getting hacked for that purpose, which is why in part I do not fully use them.