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Criminals Hitting Inboxes With Housing Spam
David Utter
Staff Writer
2007-10-04
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
Scams on the rise in September aimed at taking advantage of a drop in interest rates by soliciting personal information for housing-related "offers."
Someone has a deal for you, either a great refinancing rate, a sweet home equity loan, or even a house that has seen a price drop thanks to the cooling real estate market.
Symantec said in its October State of Spam report for September activity that spammers used these come-ons for their information grab. These offers required people to submit personal details so they can be evaluated for an offer.
That information may be used for additional spamming, as well as the usual fraud such data enables criminals to perform.
Image spam has been on the downturn, likely due to persistent efforts by security software firms to filter those out of arriving messages. Email clients, whether they are online ones like Yahoo Mail, or desktop applications like Mozilla Thunderbird, default to not loading images in incoming messages.
Plaintext or HTML messages are back in favor, with criminals using various techniques to make their URLs look more legitimate. Symantec noted the use of Geocities URLs with added spaces to foil spam filters, and JavaScript obfuscation that makes the URL look normal to the viewer, but like garbage to someone viewing the source code.
About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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