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PDFs Down, Greeting Cards Up In Spam
David Utter
Staff Writer
2007-09-06
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
The massive crush of PDF spam that had filled inboxes in early August, but receded dramatically through the month.
 | | PDFs Down, Greeting Cards Up In Spam |  |
Attachment spam in formats like PDF and XLS hit email systems in huge waves, as spammers tried evading filtering tools through these methods.
But as August wore on, those spams faded like a cool breeze on a, well, August day. Symantec said in the September version of its State of Spam Report that by the time August ended, attachment spam comprised less than a percent of the junk they observed.
Greeting card spam took up the slack. Criminals continued trying to get people to click on URLs leading to malicious executables, instead of the purported greeting card listed in the spam.
YouTube enticements were a late example of the evolving tactics of spammers. The popularity of YouTube, coupled with a message suggesting the linked "video" would be a salacious one, has served as the hook set by criminals to snare the unwary.
Since people are starting to get wise to suspicious names and domains in URLs, spammers have been using numeric IP addresses, hoping the dotted quad will be sufficient to elicit a click.
Symantec also noted a rise in spam messages with links to sites in China's .cn domain. We noted this earlier, with Trend Micro targeted by a dangerous scam leading to a fake site with malicious executables in place.
Facebook Made You Public In July: Users of the Facebook social networking site received a heads-up from site administrators yesterday. Facebook plans to make public listing information for profiles available to search crawlers, unless people opt out of that choice.
Some people may be surprised to find Facebook's announcement comes a couple of months after they actually started doing this. Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land cited one blogger who spotted the options to be exposed to public search engines or not back in July.
"I remember signing-up for Facebook before this announcement and seeing an area within the privacy settings allowing me to expose my profile to search engines or not, if I wanted," said Sullivan. "So this is new, as Facebook claims today? I don't think so."
About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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