Spammers kicking up a storm
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Uncategorized on
If it were not bad enough that some spamming scumbag were using my email address in the from field of their latest campaign to improve sexual performance through the double whammy of herbal Viagra and cheap company shares, resulting in a huge swathe of bounce messages heading my way to keep me up of a night (and not in a sexual way) I was starting to think that some of the spammed were retaliating by signing me up to all sorts of weird and wonderful online services.
Thankfully this is not the case, but rather the result of a new outbreak of malicious spams as identified by the email content security provider Marshal.
The Marshal TRACE team tells me that the spams are used as the hook to get people to visit websites where the reward is a nice little infection with the Storm Trojan. So far I have had everything from job hunting services, joke-a-day websites and even one from the mysterious ‘web players’ organisation. The common thread being that I had registered with said site or service and requesting that I login to change my temporary password for one of my choosing.
Interestingly, and assumes courtesy of the public starting to become more aware of the URL when responding to such messages, the links included do not show a fully translated domain but instead just an IP address. Ooh, clever move chaps, or it would be had I actually attempted to register with an association of online bartenders recently.
“We are seeing significant volumes of ‘confirmation spam’ hitting inboxes. This outbreak is the latest in a string of underhanded social engineering tactics used by the same individuals responsible for the Storm Trojan to propagate their botnet. These criminals are clever and highly adaptive. This is simply their latest attempt to fool unsuspecting email users into infecting themselves” Bradley Anstis, Director of Product Management at Marshal told me.
Previous attempts, since the Storm Trojan first hit the headlines back in January, have included the use of spoof news headlines such as “Saddam Hussein alive!” and a selection of greeting cards apparently sent by a friend and awaiting your attention.
The most worrying aspect of all this is that it appears this scam is being operated by the same criminal group that sent out the ‘hot pictures’ campaign at the start of the week. It could signal a trend of changing tack, modifying spam strategy every few days as opposed to the normal lifespan of such things which has traditionally stretched into months.
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