Fresh spam every day

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 23 August 2007 13:58

Business IT - Security

According to Internet content security provider, Marshal, major spam generators are now changing tactics and bombarding the Internet almost daily with a different form of bogus emails designed to catch the unwary.

The latest variant is 'confirmation spam' before that it was 'hot picture' spam. "The 'confirmation spam' outbreak has been launched by the same group that launched the Hot Pictures spam campaign earlier in the week. Previously these spam campaigns, like the greeting card campaign, would last for weeks at a time. Now however, spammers are modifying or launching new spam campaigns almost daily," said Marshal's director of product management, Bradley Anstis.

According to the Marshal TRACE team, the 'confirmation spam' emails appear to come from a legitimate organisation and provides recipients with temporary login confirmation details for a web site. The spam uses text like "for security purposes, please login and change the temporary Login ID and Password". The messages include a link to an IP address which is in fact a website infected with the Storm Trojan.

The Storm Trojan first appeared in January 2007. It quickly gained success and notoriety by using the guise of current affairs headlines to fool unsuspecting recipients into clicking on a link which lead to the Trojan. Examples of the headlines used included, "Saddam Hussein alive!" and "Chinese missile shot down by USA aircraft". Since then the group of criminals behind the Storm Trojan has used the guise of greeting cards to infect computers with subjects ranging from the 4th of July to Thank You cards.