E-mail addresses.

[Tarbicus]

I guess in this 'information age' we live in - personal information details are worth a premium for advertisers and such.

I'd just like to add that it can be more serious than that, and when Jasper says in his post about email addresses to be careful about putting your entire email address in a post (don't, or alter it for any intelligent person to figure out the alteration, IMHO) that should be taken very seriously.

Not just Spyware or Adware can end up on your machine, but trojans that can harvest your personal information. This can then be used for identity theft for internet fraud and other crime, and you could end up with the bailiffs at the door asking why you didn't pay for the car you bought three months ago in your name and seeking the money in other ways! It's actually more difficult than you think to prove you did NOT buy the car, or were involved in a fraud, if the police have any inclination you did it.

The criminals are getting very sophisticated, and I've heard reports of talented individual programmers and hackers being forced to work for criminal organisations in these scams.

You won't be scammed here on RAT (unless you dumbly respond to one of those spam threads that have been posted here lately), but if you post your full email address in a post you can guarantee you'll get loads of spam. If you open the spam then you will probably end up with spyware on your machine. Spyware is usually just a pain in the neck, but it can be nastier and sit on your machine collecting the details of your credit card transactions. Next thing, you've paid for a new car without knowing it!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spyware

Spyware has principally become associated with identity theft in that keyloggers are routinely packaged with spyware. John Bambenek, who researches information security, estimates that identity thieves have stolen over $24 billion US dollars of account information in the United States alone