Spam

Honestly, how many times have you won free stuff by clicking on links? And no… those spam, trojan, and spyware do not count as free stuff. We recently found a scam that promises a free iPad to application testers. Apparently, the site lures the person into joining an iPad application testing program while the site owner makes profit from SMS fee charges and affiliation programs. To enroll in the program, “testers” are required to complete two steps. ...

“What are you doing? “To join or to see who invited you, check the attachment.” Hmmm. That looked interesting. After I clicked on it (in virtual environment), Yahoo renamed the attachment from “Invitation+Card.zip” to “Neutral.gif” and gave a warning: Nice work Yahoo.

Toy Story 3 is romping across cinemas Worldwide, and rightly so – it’s the best of the series by far. I thought it might be worth pointing out that being a product aimed at children doesn’t exclude it from internet shenanigans. If you have young children online who are partial to searching for Toy Story material, you might want to warn them about some of the below scams. One of the most popular tactics is advertising the “full movie” on Youtube, but directing the end-user to a bunch of surveys instead: ...

When I was a child, I was fascinated by ATM machines. I had a savings account which my mother would deposit money regularly and I waited for the day that I could raid the account with the ATM card for frivolous spending on console games and fast food. Nigerians have developed a cunning method to transfer millions of dollars to lucky winners worldwide. Yes, it is indeed the humble ATM card. ...

Email hoaxes are nothing new, dating back at least as far as 1994 with what is widely believed to have been the first email hoax—referred to as the “Goodtimes virus” or the “Goodtimes virus hoax” after the subject of the email. The message in the early version was short and to the point, advising recipients not to open email messages with the subject “Good Times” because doing so would ruin their files. This, of course, was not true, but in cases where the recipient complied with the warning, it obviously had the effect of ruining their chances of actually reading any legitimate email messages with that very subject. ...

Spam emails such as the one below have been doing the rounds on the Internet hoping to lure recipients into downloading a Facebook toolbar. If you download the file by clicking on “Download Here”, you’ll see a file with the icon shown below: If you take a closer look at the icon, “darkSector” is shown inside of it. How strange. Is this actually a Facebook toolbar? Let’s take a look at the property of the file since the file looks a bit fishy. In the file properties, you’ll see the following in the Details tab. ...

We want to warn you of an email message in Spanish we’ve received with the subject ( Urgente ) Posible Terremoto y Tsunami con un 89 % de efectividad and that is of course false. The message consists of different images and informs users about an alert of earthquake and tsunami in Chile. Besides, it passes itself off as a warning of National Geographic, in order to make it more credible. ...

Last week we received a mass mailing that at first glance appeared no different from the usual mailbox clutter. The messages were in German and advertised an online casino. Nothing out of the ordinary there – after all, gambling-themed spam is one of the most popular in the German-speaking realms of cyberspace. But after a closer inspection, these messages turned out to be of much more interest – all the links in the messages led to pages created on legitimate sites that had been compromised. The links looked like this: **\*.com/news_.php or *****.com/1500.php. ...

Yesterday evening our spamtraps started receiving the email below in a mass mailing action. The email was immediately flagged as spam even before reaching our spamtraps. No wonder since it has no To:-field, it has a different Reply-to:- than the From:-field and it comes from a DSL line IP address. If the user replies to the email, the return address is set to [email protected]. Nice try, but the email is just to generic to be actually taken seriously by anyone. I expect to see targeted emails in the next days (as we’ve already seen last year). ...

Does anyone really care about opening a zip file to examine an RTF or JPEG file? This task—combined with a dull, unexciting, unstimulating subject line—competes with the content of the email to win a race of worthlessness. Spammers have traditionally used zip files to carry executables, but in most cases the subject line or the content of the message made an effort to encourage users to open the attachment. There are cases of spamming attacks in which HTML attachments opened up a fully functional Web page, capable of carrying sensitive user information back to the fraudsters. However, with this latest spam attack using zipped files, not only have the spammers made an attempt to escape anti-spam filters, they’re missing out on reaching any users as well. The scope of returns for these messages looks to be much less rewarding than other comparable attacks. ...

…and some of it masquerades as “marketing” and “newsletter” emails. In March 2010, spam continued to account for a high percentage of all email traffic, peaking at 93.6% of all messages. The majority of this spam email was sent using certain tactics that were deployed to hijack unsecured computers and hide the senders’ identity. Recently, however, there has been an uptick in spam “marketing” and “newsletter” emails. These spam marketing and newsletter emails share one significant commonality with “regular” spam emails, which is that they are unwanted email messages sent to individuals who have no formal relationship with the message sender. ...

Microsoft has made the right decision to temporarily turn off Hotmail’s vacation (e.g., out-of-office) reply feature. Flip the switch off permanently, I say. “In our fight against spam, we sometimes have to make hard choices, and we had to make one this week. We discovered that spammers were using Hotmail’s automatic vacation reply feature to send spam from their Hotmail accounts,” Krish Vitaldevara, Windows Live Hotmail lead program manager, blogged late yesterday. I missed the post because of Apple’s iPhone OS 4 launch. I spotted the announcement first at LiveSide about an hour ago. ...

…”click here to view”. Yes, it seems almost anything is a target for money generating survey spam. In this case, we start with a Youtube video: And we finish with this: Even better, these “fill in a survey to see the content” websites now pop up an additional message as you try to leave the page: “Help keep this content free. Please take one minute to complete a SPAM-free market research survey to gain access to this special content.” ...

The National Bureau of Economic Research has previously indicated that the United States has been in a recession since December 2007. What is interesting to note here is that Symantec first reported that spammers were showing an interest in the slowdown of the economy in October and November of 2007, so this begs the question, “Can the focus of spam email be used as an economic indicator or barometer?” Let’s take a brief look at the recession (thus far) by looking through Symantec’s spam folder (a.k.a. the Symantec Global Intelligence Network). ...

I don’t believe it!! This morning I’ve received an email sent by Google notifying me that I´ve won $950,000, so I think this will be the last post I’m going to write 😉 Well, I haven’t taken part in any promotion of this kind and I’ve never heard that Google gives prizes just like that, but I can consider it as if I won the lottery. Here you have the content of the message: ...