Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Security firms have warned of a new pump-and-dump spam campaign that is attempting to manipulate share prices through MP3 music files. Files posing as music from stars such as Elvis Presley, Fergie and Carrie Underwood actually contain a monotone voice encouraging people to buy shares in a little-known company.
Emails seen by security firm Sophos often contain
no subject line or message body but have attached to them an MP3 file
typically named after a popular music artist.
Some of the filenames used include hurricanechris.mp3, allforone.mp3,
carrieunderwood.mp3, elvis.mp3, baby.mp3, fergie.mp3, and bbrown.mp3.
US-based security firm Commtouch estimates the outbreak accounts for around 7-10% of all spam, globally, over the past 18 hours.
The voice on the MP3 file, which is randomly altered in an attempt to avoid detection by anti-spam filters, says the following:
"Hello, this is an investor alert
Exit Only Incorporated has announced it is ready to launch its new
text4cars.com website, already a huge success in Canada, we are
expecting amazing results in the USA.
Go read the news and sit on EXTO. That symbol again is EXTO. Thank you."
Exit Only, Inc is a company listed on Pink Sheets that runs a website
marketplace for new and used motor vehicles. Some of the MP3 files
repeat the message twice, rather than once.
According to Commtouch, the sound quality of the recordings is very
poor: 16 kbps bitrate and 11 KHz sample rate with an average length of
30 seconds. They are also highly randomized in order to avoid email
filters.
The stock spam MP3 file can be found at: http://www..sophos.com.au/images/sounds/stock-spam.mp3
"Users may click on the MP3 file expecting to hear Elvis, but they'll
be all shook up when they discover it's actually a voice resembling
Marvin the Paranoid Android droning on about a stock that is set to be
the next big thing," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant
for Sophos.
Sophos experts believe that firms should consider policing the types of file which come into their networks via email.
"Although the spammers seem to have quite a fair bit to learn about
machine-generated sales patter, some companies might consider blocking
all MP3s in email as a matter of course," said Cluley. "So many music
files infringe copyright, and it can be hard for a company to establish
which ones are legal and which aren't after they've arrived. Blocking
MP3s, or at least quarantining until requested by the user, can be a
good way for a company to take a proactive stance against the use of
email for illegal file sharing. It also has the benefit of neutralising
this sort of spam at the same time."
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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