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Is Your Inbox Haunted By Ghosts?
Chris Crum
Staff Writer
2006-06-09
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
A number of strange emails have been circulating containing both HTML and random strings of numbers.
Various security companies have been referring to the emails as "Ghost email" or "Ghost spam", and believe that they are the result of a hacker testing their email list. Most are expecting some sort of attack such as Malware to follow. Gregg Keizer of TechWeb reports on the subject:The messages, which Panda Software characterized as "ghost mail," are unusual in that the send and from fields are the recipient's own address, that the subject heading is a number -- 455, 557, 56757, 586876, or 1545453 -- and the message body is a mix of HTML and apparently random numbers.
Unlike most malicious mail or spam, these do not include a file attachment (the usual way e-mail is used to deliver worms or Trojan horses), nor do they include an embedded link, as do phishing messages. Aside from Panda, Keizer cites theories from Symantec as well as users of GMail who think they are to be the targets of whatever is going down. Symantec apparently disagrees, seeing as how people who don't use GMail are also receiving the messages...seems like a reasonable argument to the theory.
Tags: ghost spam, ghost email
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About the Author:
Chris Crum is a staff writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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