In its recent biannual Internet Security Threat Report, Symantec warns that although the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has significantly advanced in curtailing the volume of phishing and spam attacks, the region in totality, and Saudi Arabia in particular, seems to face a greater threat from organized, international groups of online criminals, as reported by ArabianBusiness on April 15, 2008.

Utah University students, staff and faculty members got e-mail on April 17, 2008, claiming to come from the university office and asking for personal information, including account number.

Phishing is widely used technique of criminals to extract personal information, like user names, credit card number, and passwords of a mail recipient by disguising in the cloak of a reliable entity.

According to Marshal's TRACE Team, a malicious spam outbreak is being triggered from the Srizbi botnet that has been identified to send the largest amount of spam and to account for 45% of the total spam caught on the Internet.

A Raleigh lawyer faces charges of hacking into the official e-mail account belonging to her ex-boyfriend, a senior Wake official, some 1,400 times or more between August and December 2007.

Christina Paulette Medlin, 31, faces legal charges on one count of committing severe crime of tapping government computers. According to her lawyer, the e-mail account was that of Joseph K. Durham, the Deputy County Manager.

User data lost from Auction.co.kr has been posted on the Chinese Websites and made available for sale, raising concerns over possible damage from spam mail or voice phishing. According to South Korea's principal police officials, a theft occurred on the personal data of 10.81 Million users from the well-known Internet shopping site hosted in Korea, as reported by Donga on April 21, 2008.

Security analysts at SophosLabs have disclosed that 92.3% of all messages transmitted in the first quarter of 2008 were unsolicited e-mails. Also, during this time-span, Sophos discovered 23,300 novel spam-related Web pages daily, or one after every three seconds.

Phishing e-mails recently reached the Portland State University (PSU) to thousands of its students and teachers. The e-mails claimed they were from User Support Services and the IT departments of the university, as reported by VANGUARD on April 10, 2008.

According to security researchers at SANS Internet Storm Center, thousands of CEOs (chief executive officers), on April 15, 2008, in the US became targets of a new phishing scam that distributed e-mails summoning recipients to provide testimony in national court.

A man from West Australia faces charges of allegedly flooding spam mails to networks of the Western Australia (WA) and New South Wales (NSW) police. The accused is scheduled to arrive in Rockingham Magistrates Court on charges of two instances of unauthorized damage to data stored in computer systems, as reported by perthnow on April 10, 2008.