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 [...]
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 [...]
The FBI sent out a press announcement yesterday, warning the public about three scams. The three scams are:
-e-cards containing malware
-fraudulent emails misrepresenting the FBI using pictures of the FBI Director, seal, letter head, and/or banners
-email claiming to be from an official of the U.S. military sent on behalf of American soldiers stationed overseas
We have seen [...]
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 [...]
Over the last week or so there has been an outbreak of a new type of email-borne malware. The latest wave of the notorious Storm malware is being distributed via emails that appear to be ecards sent by family and friends. The link to view the card leads users to a malicious website that attempts [...]
We reported last month in the Commtouch Q1 2007 Spam Trends Report that a new kind of spam had appeared that links to a hosted image rather that embedding it in the message itself. In the samples reported on spammers fraudulently hijacked legimate email newsletters and implanted a reference to a spam image at the [...]
Image spam tricks spam filters, clogs networks
By Sue Hildreth, contributor
15 Mar 2007 | SearchSecurity.com
”A picture is worth a thousand words,” goes the old saying. What is true in art and journalism is proving equally apt in the more modern field of spam. As the recent surge in image-based spam shows, pictures can be a very [...]
