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McAfee Labs :

PDF Spam Outbreak

Tuesday, June 26, 2007 at 8:44am by Nick Kelly
Nick Kelly

A large “pump-and-dump” stock spam campaign is underway, but rather than including the content of the spam in an image file, this campaign includes the spam content within a .PDF file. The stock spam is believed to be sent from Stration infected computers, as this spam campaign closely followed a new W32/Stration worm mass-mailing which contained a number of .PDF files, and Stration has been associated with pump and dump spam in the past.

The current spam contains one or more .PDF files, has a randomly generated subject line and sender name, and a blank message body. The .PDF files contain images which look very similar to previous image based stock spam. 

PDF Image spam

The appearance of PDF-based spam was predicted by AVERT in the article “Email Spam Plague Persists” in the latest SAGE report, as .PDF files can be more easily automated than other document formats. This prediction appears to be holding true, and as .GIF based image spam continues to decline we expect spammers will continue to try similar methods of sending image based spam.

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Comments (23)

  • Brad October 2, 2007 12:02AM

    Emails are on of the most popular method in terms of spamming. Although it is easy to delete the Spam Emails after they are being received yet it is very difficult to filter such emails. Especially if they contain PDF Spams. Spam Filtering may reduce the number of spams for a short while but you cant say that it is an ultimate solution to Spamming. The reason is that the Spammers are aware of these filtering techniques whether it is Filtering with BogoFire, Spamassasin or some other. There are many websites available that are providing the information on Email-Spamming Solutions but most of this information is either irrelevant or not useful. I have recently visited a website that is
    Anti-Spamming Info Website
    It contains useful information regarding Spams, Email-Spam, Spam Filtering as well as different kind of Spams that are used.

    Reply
  • Josh July 28, 2007 8:06AM

    The pdf emails seem to be subsiding a little bit. I’ve some success with spambully and spambayes, but a few of these are still going to slip through the cracks.

    Reply
  • Henrik Soke July 24, 2007 12:31PM

    Yeah, my Outlook 2003 takes care of them all too :) But they are sooo annoying.

    Reply
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