Risks

The huge volume of spam now circulating requires ISPs and other businesses to spend time and network resources filtering it. And individual users lose productivity when they are interrupted, distracted, and annoyed by manually filtering the spam that gets through. In addition, spam is increasingly malicious, often carrying additional risks such as phishing scams and malware.

Phishing

Phishing is fraudulent email designed to look legitimate and intended to get the recipient to divulge personal information, such as bank account numbers and passwords.

Trojan horse

A Trojan horse, as the name suggests, is a program that disguises its intent. It will appear to be useful or harmless but contains hidden code designed to exploit or damage the system on which it is run.

Worm

A worm uses self-propagating malicious code that can automatically distribute itself from one computer to another through network connections. Worms may also deliver a payload in addition to replicating.

Virus

A virus attempts to spread from computer to computer by attaching itself to a host program. It may damage hardware, software, or data. When the host is executed, the virus code also runs, infecting new hosts and sometimes delivering an additional payload.