From my personal experience, the efforts being put into e-mail based attacks is greatly increasing. My guess is low-level attacks that target a massive amount o

From my personal experience, the efforts being put into e-mail based attacks is greatly increasing. My guess is low-level attacks that target a massive amount of people indirectly are turning out to be less lucrative compared to previous years. Probably due to better filtering and people generally being more wise to it. The new attacks I've seen, which happened to me directly as well, seem to use more direct methods. Instead of just a blanket phishing e-mail, the e-mail will come in as just being from an "old friend". The e-mail looks legit and the person doing it even puts in efforts to know where you worked in the past or your past history (my guess is they grab this data from facebook or similar social media). They will talk to you and the story they give you sounds completely legit. A lot of the stories they give you do sound legit and will check out but they only check out due to being somewhat vague (like they know where you worked but don't know exactly what you did there). The reason I was targeted is most likely because I used mtgox (the first bitcoin exchange which eventually got hacked - database stolen which included my e-mail address and full name). My guess is they think I have a large stash of bitcoin or similar cryptocurrencies. The real shocker is they have a scary amount of personal information about you. Some of this data I can only see it coming from hacked databases from compromised websites - date of birth, phone number, full work history, current address etc. among others.