Robert Siciliano is a NextAdvisor.com Expert Guest Blogger
There are no long as most phishing emails were of a supposed Nigerian general. And you and I have been flattered that we were the ones to help the general transfer of 35 million on the chosen country, since the Nigerian government was a bunch of jerks and would not leave the legacy of his wife had inherited from her 
I remember distinctly get a phishing e-mail from Nigeria in 1994, when I was an AOL account, and did call my bank and ask them what their thoughts were and what I should do. I mean 10% of 35 million, which the scammer in exchange offered my help to transfer the funds, was fresh enough for the nominal work. All I had to do was great before 10 in a wire transfer to it all. My bank my general thought of Nigeria and I were both nuts, and really did not know what I should do.
We did not have much data on 419 scams or fraud affinity at the time, or at least we do not have reliable access to the data, so I relied on what my mother I said from the beginning: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is not. I deleted the email. Then I began to see more and more emails from others in the same dilemma as the general.
Times have changed dramatically.
Today, with the low cost delivery of emails, billions of fraudulent e-mails are sent each year. Any sales person knows that it is a numbers game. With billions of emails, you will eventually get someone to buy into. 
Not too long ago, most spam emails came from some legitimate servers. When the government cracked down with the Can Spam Act, spam underground. Most of today's phishing emails originate from botnets. But what has not changed is the sophistication, or lack of fraud victims thereof. Fraudsters are smarter, but the victims, not so much.
While phishing emails continue to pour in, their methods are changing rapidly. Posing as a Nigerian prince is still common, but not as effective. While posing as a reputable bank or Paypal, request to update an account for various reasons and request the user name of a potential victim and password are not as effective as it used to be.
Much of phishing that occurs today is targeted "spear phishing," in which spammers are after a localized target. Recently, the usernames and passwords for 700 Comcast customers were displayed on a document sharing website, perhaps a result of a phishing attack. Comcast employee with access to this type of data could easily be fooled by a phisher posing as own IT staff to Comcast, and foolishly published customer information.
Go after a CEO is called "whaling." Who better to take down the biggest of all phish? Most business websites offer a lot of data on the leaders the business and administrative contacts, which makes it relatively easy to create a list of miller. If the scammers sent a blast email to the entire company, eventually someone is likely to cough enough data to allow fraudsters to tap into the company intranet. once scammers have accessed the intranet, all phishing emails still appear to come from an internal source of confidence.
even phishers follow a similar editorial calendar newspapers and magazines publishers, coordinating their attacks around the holidays and the change of seasons. They capitalize on major events and natural disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina and more recently, swine flu. Since the outbreak of swine flu, as much as 2% of all spam has the words "swine flu" in the subject line. Many swine flu referral sites in the address were also recorded.
Perhaps the most insidious type of phishing occurs when a recipient clicks on a link, either in the body of an email or on the spoofed website linked in the email -mail, and a download begins. This download is almost always a virus with a remote control component, which gives the phisher full access to user data, including user names and passwords, credit card details, services banking and social security numbers. Often, it even makes PC virus from the victim of a botnet.
How to avoid becoming a victim? Remove.
And of course, update your Internet security software and make sure the operating system of your PC has the latest critical security patches.
Robert Siciliano, identity theft speaker, discusses scam-baiters.
Robert Siciliano is CEO of IDTheftSecurity.com, an expert on identity theft, professional speaker, security analyst, published author and television news correspondent. Siciliano works with Fortune 1000 and start-up companies as a consultant on product launches, branding, messaging, representation, SEO and media. the thoughts and advice of Siciliano on all these issues often appear in both television and print media news, including CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, FOX, Forbes and USA Today. He has 25 years of safety training as a member of the American Society for Industrial Security. He is the author of two books, including The Safety Minute: Living on high alert; How to take control of your personal safety and to prevent fraud . He also established a partnership with Uni-Ball to help raise awareness of the growing threat of identity theft and provide tips on how you can protect yourself.