Print | Send on Yahoo! | PDF version | RSS | Filed Under: SPAM REVIEW

The Spam Omelette #55 – Canadian Pharmacy Takes it All

Welcome to the New Year and to a new issue of our Spam Omelette, the weekly review focused on the latest trends in the spam industry. It has been more than a year since the inception of our project dealing with visual representations of spam messages, but just in case you joined us of late, please take a look at our testing and map generation methodology, as explained our first issue

Week In review:  December 30 2009 - January 06 2010

Although the new year has barely begun, spammers are already hard at work pumping junk in users mailboxes. Since the shopping season is over and so is users' budget, this week's unsolicited messages are mostly focused on selling sexual enhancements such as knock-off Viagra and Cialis.

This issue of the Spam Omelette will be a special one, since the top five spam words for the past week are part of the same spam wave impersonating legitimate newsletters.

This specific spam wave is notable in size and seems to originate from computers infected with Trojan.Spammer.Tedroo, a malicious bot that has been also used to send spam mentioning celebrity names. Spammers have used a single e-mail template showing a centered image and labeled as "Copyright (5 random digits) Inc. All rights reserved". More than that, the message headers have been tampered with in order to hide the true identity of the sender.

The same medicine e-shop is also responsible for a second, small-size spam wave featuring a slogan and a link to a Canadian Pharmacy website clone. In order to avoid Bayesian spam filters, the message includes a couple of lines of "junk" text (meaningless sentences that have no commercial value, but add extra words to a suspiciously short message) taken from Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace.