Phishng attacks are quite common.  But what is worrying IT managers now are spear phishing attacks, wherein the criminals attack a few targeted individuals and this could include your CEO

Lottery scam is becoming one of the fastest growing areas of cyber crime.  It is reported based on a survey conducted by Microsoft that more than 50 % of all spam involves lottery scams.  

Experts say that business transactions between criminals are on the rise in the virtual world creating a new cyber crime business sector in itself.  There are criminal syndicates who operate in the internet who rent out their wares like botnets (Botnet is a collection of software robots, or bots, which run autonomously and automatically. They run on groups of "zombie" computers controlled remotely by hackers.)  

Social networking sites like Orkut, MySpace, Hi5 and Xing have caught the imagination of the netizens and many anecdotes are adrift in cyberspace as to how netizens have established contacts with long lost friends and loved ones. But these have a flip side. Creating a profile in these websites is an easy process and this has created many issues. Problems abound in the cyberspace because of its anonymous nature. Often the only requirement for creating a profile in these sites is a valid email address. As such there is no authenticating mechanism for verifying the details provided by a user.