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Child Porn Spam On The Rise
David Utter
Staff Writer
2006-03-28
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
Exceptionally offensive emails that attempt to lure recipients to child-porn sites have been increasing in number.
The Sophos security firm advised the public of a rise in spam activity focused on bringing visitors to pedophilia sites. They noted a three-fold uptick in the number of child-porn websites coinciding with all those new junk messages.
Sophos noted how its monitoring stations collected samples of these messages around the world. The composition of the subject lines leaves no doubt as to the illegal sites linked from the messages.
Worse, the spammers have been crafting the messages to get around spam filters. They have been drawing random quotations from a database and in some cases placing asterisks between letters in subject headings to elude filters that use pattern matching to catch spam.
"Seeing such offensive emails in our spam traps is always upsetting because no one should need to deal with such unpleasant material," Carole Theriault, senior security consultant at Sophos, said in the report. "It is too early to say whether this is a new trend, but this week has shown definite growth in the number of child-porn websites being linked to from spam messages."
Resources such as the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children offer more information to help people get informed and involved with the battle against child-porn and other child safety issues. Users can also find out more about the AMBER Alert program at the site.
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Tags: Spam, AMBER Alert |
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About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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