Todays security update: play it safe by getting your news from legitimate sources and not from attachments in your e-mail.

We know to be leery of links and attachments in our e-mail messages, but that doesn't stop scammers from trying to pull off their tricks. Over the holiday weekend, hackers were busy spamming out e-mails with fraudulent news of war in the Middle East in a scheme to con curious people into opening malicious attachments.

The e-mails, with subject lines like "USA Missile Strike: Iran War Just Have Started," have malicious attachments with names like movie.exe, video.exe, and readmore.exe. The executable file attachment is a worm that downloads and installs Trojans onto your PC; one of the nasties is the now infamous Storm Trojan, guilty of propagating malware assaults in January and February, and taking the prize for the worst malware outbreak since 2005.

While this type of attack is nothing new, it's a reminder that we can't let our guard down online. We may all be sick of spam but, unfortunately, it's not slowing down anytime soon. A new IDC study projects that over 97 billion e-mails will be sent daily worldwide in 2007, with spam making up 40 billion of those messages.