People are used to seeing Viagra or fake Rolexes promoted in spam, but have you ever seen spam that is selling fake Rolexes (and other replicas) that never mentions it in the email? Makes it hard for content filters to flag it as spam… Take a look at something Commtouch Recurrent Pattern Detection picked up [...]
It looks like spammers also get nostalgic around the holiday season. The spammer who sent these stock scams, must have been reminiscing about old-fashioned text spam when this outbreak was concocted. The sad truth is this kind of low-tech spam can still get thru a lot of content-based filters, since the trading symbol of a [...]
Way back in March, CTO Amir Lev was quoted in a SearchSecurity article as saying that audio spam shouldn’t be too far away. We even went so far as to create some samples in our labs (no, we didn’t give them to any spammers :). And finally, as of late last night, the spammers have [...]
Image spam on the whole is on the decline, and stock pump-and-dump has all but disappeared. But image spam hasn’t been eliminated altogether. Lately our spam detection center has seen a significant increase in pornographic image spam (the URLs are part of the picture), as well as “cut” image spam. The cut images appear to [...]
In case you don’t understand the cryptic headline, I’ll explain: part of our work in detecting and blocking spam is collecting information about spam sites that spammers try to drive users to visit. This web-related data that we gather from analyzing billions of messages each day will actually form a big piece of Commtouch’s next [...]
Commtouch just identified a new spam technique that spammers have been experimenting with massively over the past 24 hours: spam with a zipped attachment, sometimes password-protected, and the zip contains a text file with a stock promotion. Some facts:
1) Commtouch identified this new type of “Zip spam” yesterday (July 30) at 10 pm GMT, and [...]
Well it’s about time someone decided to distribute a stock pump&dump message inside an excel file.
Commtouch first identified and blocked this new type of spam on Saturday, July 21, at 1:20 pm GMT. The Excel spam promotes stocks in file attachments with names like “invoice20202.xls,” “stock information-3572.xls,” and “requested report.xls.”
Of course this seems like a [...]
This just in from our detection center: malware distributors are starting to plant their malicious software into legitimate sites, in order to bypass traditional filtering engines. The minute the site in the email message is identified as legitimate, often email filters will assume the URL within the site is also legitimate, and will allow it [...]
The Commtouch Detection Center has just reported that PDF spam has been spiking over the last 24 hours, making up 10-15% of all spam messages. Given the fact that these messages are nearly 4x bigger than ’standard’ spam messages, this increases overall global spam traffic by 30-40%.
The new technique of sending spam messages as a [...]
We all know that the evil forces behind spam, beyond being evil, are also quite prolific. In the tit-for-tat war between junkmail senders and the anti-spam community, the junkers have come up with yet another trick - PDF spam. Some of what we are seeing is really just ‘Image spam 2.0′ because it’s just another [...]
