Image and PDF spam have been on the downturn, with plain old text and a tricky use of the mailto tag arriving in pump and dump spams.
Everything old is new again, and we can count plaintext spam in that category.
Symantec researcher Kelly Conley said the old penny stock spam standby has returned. It's not like the spam circa mid-1990s, Conley noted:
The most recent morphing we've observed over the past few days includes highly obfuscated messages with a few distinctive features. For starters, none of the message headers in the attack contain a subject line. This means that when it lands in your inbox there will be no subject line for the message.
There is a subject line in the body of the message. The spammer is most likely doing this for obfuscation purposes.
Other features of this pump and dump attack are the inclusion of random, alphabetized email address in the body and then an additional set of headers (in the body) followed by the penny stock that is being pumped.
The odd part of the spam comes in how the price of the stock is being presented as part of a mailto tag, instead of the customary URL spammers usually choose. This is probably just part of the obfuscation of the message to get past spam filters.
About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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