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Spammers Target Email Newsletters
David Utter
Staff Writer
2007-01-19
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Criminals have started to mimic newsletters to carry their product promotion messages, and that imitation includes forging message headers to make it look like the real publisher sent them.
 | | Spammers Target Email Newsletters |  |
Symantec senior director of anti-abuse engineering Doug Bowers told SecurityProNews of a new trick the security company has observed in the world of spam. Some junk mailers have taken to imitating email newsletters and blasting them to recipients.
Whoever is behind the latest scam has been placing product promotions for drugs within these newsletters. Currently the scam is fairly low impact as it is image spam. Participation in the scam requires the recipient to actively seek out the company mentioned in the faked newsletter.
If it were not for the fact these criminals are abusing the reputations of the companies whose emails are being copied for the spam, the whole thing might be seen as a joke. Seeing ads for drugs within a newsletter from the rather staid Kohl's department store chain was just surreal.
It isn't a laughing matter for the legitimate businesses being co-opted for a criminal's scheme. People who receive these messages may be subscribers to the real newsletter. When they receive a look-alike complete with pharmaceutical ads, they probably won't realize immediately what has happened.
That means they will probably complain to the business, which may not realize that a fake newsletter has been spammed out to appear to come from the company. Misunderstandings will occur unless the company knows this is happening and can explain it to the customer.
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Tag: Spam
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About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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