Pharmaceutical spammers typically include a URL in their emails since they want to direct recipients to visit their site and purchase their (usually counterfeit) viagra, cialis, etc. However URLs are pretty straightforward to block in many anti-spam solutions, so spammers are always looking for new ways to hide their URLs. A [...]
When an email from one our employees to his loan officer asking about re-financing his mortgage got blocked by his bank’s spam filter, we decided to look into the phenomenon a little more closely. Turns out that spammers are leveraging the refinancing fervor that was sparked by the Fed’s rate cut last week, causing a [...]
The Commtouch Detection Center identified a massive outbreak of pharmaceutical image spam that started last week, with a neat new trick: the spammers camouflaged
their messages as Hotmail welcome messages. They literally took the text and layout of the Hotmail messages and hid it within the body of the html source. They did another cute trick [...]
Thought we were done with ecards? Not yet! Just in from our detection center: a new blended threat with emails in Russian and English, purporting to be a postcard from a friend from the popular postcard site postcard.ru, but actually links to a site that tries to download an .exe file to the user’s computer. [...]
Commtouch Labs is reporting mid-level volumes of a love-themed blended attack generated from zombies. The messages are tiny (around 2k), and have a love-oriented subject (e.g. “Memories of you”), and a short love-oriented message in the body (e.g. “A token of my love”; “falling in love with you”; “Happy I’ll be your bride”), with a [...]
John never knew how many friends he had…until he opened the door to a truckload of spam. A short, funny movie about Commtouch RPD technology.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnD50mSvLPk
The recently released Commtouch 2007 Q4 Email Threats Trend Report shows that during the last quarter global spam average 80% of all email traffic and reached 96% at it’s peak in October.
Since everyone reports spam levels a little differently, we’d like to take this opportunity to explain how we measure global spam levels here at [...]
Spamnation features an up-to-date list of all the stocks featured in email pump-and-dump scams. Sign up for the RSS feed and get updates automatically.
A while ago I wrote about how spammers can make use of the “email a friend” functionality of photosharing sites to send spam. In reality, any web site that allows you to email someone else can be abused to send unsolicited email. Here’s a new example, in which a message touting replica watches has been [...]
Happy 2008! We’ve decided to celebrate the New Year by opening up the Commtouch blog, eliminating the password-protection that kept a barrier between our musings of the past year and the curious eyes of the world. At least I hope your eyes are curious! There’s lots of good stuff from the months past, so I [...]
