Russian Spam on YouTube

We had earlier blogged about spammers abusing different social networking websites and taking full advantage to host their spam on them. Recently researchers at McAfee Labs came across a new spam campaign in which yet another big social networking website, YouTube, is being abused.

As we know, YouTube is a video sharing website on which users can upload and share videos. During a recent spam campaign, we saw that Russian spammers had created a spam video and are hosting it on YouTube. This new spam trend, hosting spam videos, could possibly alarm other regional spammers and as a result we may see spam videos in other languages including English, Chinese, and German, etc.

Some of the subjects lines read as:-

Subject: ВАША РЕКЛАМА МОЖEТ БЫТЬ ЗДЕСЬ

Subject: Служба e-mail раccылок

Translated to English:-

Subject: Your advertisement can be here

Subject:  Service for e-mail distribution

The mail body is short, with a link to YouTube. Users who might have clicked on the URL would have watched a small video of approximately 36 seconds in which two guys converse in Russian, At the end of the video the spammer inserts information like telephone and ICQ numbers to reach them.

Translated to English:-

Widespread distribution – http://www.youtube.com/watch?Text has been removed

The text on the video was somewhat like this:

Массовые рассылки реклама в интернет.  [This text in Russian was seen as a heading for sequence 2]

Translated to English:-

Mass mailing advertisement on the Internet.

Here are other recent spam details:

1) Russian spam mails are seen with obfuscated phone and ICQ numbers at the end of the mail

2) The opt-out option is missing in Russian mails

3) The mail is generally short with a single URL

4) Russian words in the mail body are also obfuscated

5) The mail body text is multicolored

6) Typical spammed categories for Russian mails include adult, lease, educational, and service/product promo

Finally, don’t click any URLs or links in a suspicious email, and most importantly stay up to date with software patches.