Are you seeing PDF Spam?
Is there a correlation between all these spam emails you've been seeing that you have a greeting card from a "friend," "neighbor,", "mate," as well as others, and the increase in other spam emails? Some think so.
Sophos, a security firm which monitors this believes the increase is directly related. Spammers used to send text messages. Then filters were made to look for certain words, phrases, patterns or the frequency of use of certain words. The spam filters did their job. So the spammers started using pictures of their messages embedded in the email. This got it through the word filters. But eventually some filters were catching up to these methods and the success rate at trashing the messages was increasing. So the spammers have gone to attached PDF files. Many users receive valid PDF attachments so canceling all these could be detrimental to business.
Sophos believes there is a correlation between the increase in e-greeting card messages and the PDF (attachment) spam messages. Netizens read the email and go to a linked site for their bogus greeting card. There, they get infected with malicious software (malware) and are unaware they are now being used to help send all these spam messages.
So far, the attachment spam has not been infectious. It is a "pump and dump" maneuver to artificially inflate some stocks value. The companies are not the problem, it is the investors trying to make the profit on a sale. The Security and Exchange Commission appears worried about stock spam. It suspended trading on 35 companies that had been promoted in email messages, last March.
While the PDF attachments have not been found to be harmful, as with any attachment, if you are not expecting it, don't open it. And if you are not expecting an e-greeting or don't recognize the sender or the site, don't go there to open it. And as alway, keep your virus files and firewalls on and up to date.
Sophos, a security firm which monitors this believes the increase is directly related. Spammers used to send text messages. Then filters were made to look for certain words, phrases, patterns or the frequency of use of certain words. The spam filters did their job. So the spammers started using pictures of their messages embedded in the email. This got it through the word filters. But eventually some filters were catching up to these methods and the success rate at trashing the messages was increasing. So the spammers have gone to attached PDF files. Many users receive valid PDF attachments so canceling all these could be detrimental to business.
Sophos believes there is a correlation between the increase in e-greeting card messages and the PDF (attachment) spam messages. Netizens read the email and go to a linked site for their bogus greeting card. There, they get infected with malicious software (malware) and are unaware they are now being used to help send all these spam messages.
So far, the attachment spam has not been infectious. It is a "pump and dump" maneuver to artificially inflate some stocks value. The companies are not the problem, it is the investors trying to make the profit on a sale. The Security and Exchange Commission appears worried about stock spam. It suspended trading on 35 companies that had been promoted in email messages, last March.
While the PDF attachments have not been found to be harmful, as with any attachment, if you are not expecting it, don't open it. And if you are not expecting an e-greeting or don't recognize the sender or the site, don't go there to open it. And as alway, keep your virus files and firewalls on and up to date.
posted by Andy at
3:48 PM
1 Comments:
Although not harmful attachment themselves, the sudden increase of this type of spam can hog a company's bandwidth... to the network performance's detriment. Besides PDF, other attachment spam email are also on the rise, and these can be more harmful. It's important for the net admins to be aware of these types of threats. I ran across a free white paper recently about attachment spam - which discusses the different types... it's a pretty good read, plus it's free ;-)
By
Security, at 1:39 AM
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