If you fall for a social engineer's trickery, it's embarrassing.

If malware were biological, the world would be in the grip of the worst pandemic in history. In 2009, more than 25 million unique malware programs were identified, more than all the malware programs ever created in all previous years. No one need wonder what all that malware is trying to do: It's trying to steal money -- through data theft, bank transfers, stolen passwords, or swiped identities.

If the Internet is the new Wild West, then hackers are the wanted outlaws of our time. And like the gun-slinging bad boys before them, all it takes is one wrong move to land them in jail.

When it comes to social engineering attacks, larger companies attract more of them, and when they are victimized it costs more per incident, according to a survey sponsored by Check Point.

The latest social engineering trick to get victims to open malicious email attachments accuses them of being spammers and threatens to sue them if they don't stop.

In the last three months of 2010 attackers managed to serve 3 million malicious advertising, or malvertising, impressions every day. That's the headline figure from a report released today from Web security firm Dasient. According to Dasient, that's a 100 percent increase from the preceding quarter.

Of the 135 people Fortune 500 employees targeted by social engineering hackers in a recent contest only five of them refused to give up any corporate information whatsoever. And guess what? All five were women.

A few companies in the Fortune 500 need to upgrade their Web browsers. And while they're at it, a little in-house training on social engineering wouldn't be a bad idea, either.

Social engineering, the act of tricking people into giving up sensitive information, is nothing new. Convicted hacker Kevin Mitnick made a name for himself by cold-calling staffers at major U.S. companies and talking them into giving him information. But today's criminals are having a heyday using e-mail and social networks. A well-written phishing message or virus-laden spam campaign is a cheap, effective way for criminals to get the data they need.

The perpetual proliferation of botnets is hardly surprising when one considers just how easy it is for the bad guys to hijack computers without tipping off the users.