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The Spam Omelette #32 – On Job Offerings and MSN Newsletters

Welcome to this week’s issue of the Spam Omelette, BitDefender’s report on spam trends and techniques. If you happen to have joined later our newsletter, please do have a look on our testing methodology and spam map generation procedures before proceeding with today’s article.

Week in Review:  June 24 - July 1

 

1. Unsubscribing from spam is tough business

This week's top word in the spam landscape is UNSUBSCRIBE, a term that has shown up in our previous reports, but never managed to claim the first place before. The word's mere presence in the top  reveals that spam messages impersonating legit newsletters are a growing trend. According to the BitDefender spam researchers, 59 percent of the worldwide spam is made of forged newsletters featuring a medicine-related image and pointing to a .cn domain.

 

2. Hot OFFERS for your inbox

Ranking second in this week's issue of the Spam Omelette, the word OFFERS has been detected in messages coming from Canadian Pharmacy. This particular spam wave impersonates newsletters sent by MSN in the MSN Featured Offers program, but it has been rigged with an image advertising Canadian Pharmacy products.

 

3. MSN - Corporate impersonation in spam

As described above, Microsoft's MSN brand ranks third in this week's spam top. The word mostly occurs in forged newsletters rigged with image medicine advertisements. Canadian Pharmacy is not only abusing the MSN brand, but also advertises their products as genuine Pfizer (the legal owner of the Viagra and Cialis brands). As usually, these fake newsletters come with an image pointed to a Chinese domain composed of six random letters.

 

 

4. Job offerings flooding EMAIL inboxes

Ranking fourth in this week's spam top, the word EMAIL has been identified in a less-common spam wave advertising job offers. Coming at a time when most of the employers have ceased recruitments on account of the global crisis, the spam message offers naïve recipients everything but the kitchen sink. However, in order to be eligible, the recipient has to attach a Curriculum Vitae, along with other sensitive data that might dramatically help the spammer carry out an identity theft attempt.

As usually, you are advised NOT to respond any inquiries coming from unknown or dubious senders, as well as not to divulge extra information on yourself.

 

5. One CLICK away from Canadian Pharmacy

The word CLICK concludes this week's top in a less-common spam template coming from Canadian Pharmacy. It's less common because the message subject  would be more suitable for a phishing attempt rather than for advertising sexual enhancements. The spammer addresses the message to "Paypal valued members", but all the embedded links take the user to PharmacySmartJoin .com via a Chinese domain that also verifies the reference ID and validates users'email addresses against a spam database.