New spam tricks not so new
Spammers are increasingly relying on legitimate content and web sites to cloak their messages, attempting to bypass traditional controls by passing their messages off as genuine. IT Week
And this is new?
Come on this spamming strategy has been round for ages.
"… spammers are stepping up attempts to bypass traditional content analysis protection. Spammers are using reputable web sites and content to weaken traditional anti-spam protection"
"Because anti-spam products aim to minimise the number of legitimate messages they flag as spam, spammers are seeking to exploit this by making messages appear authentic."
What email security firm Commtouch Software doesn’t realise is that they have just highlighted the issue that is the biggest weakness with filtering software. It doesn’t work
In one case, Commtouch identified a massive outbreak of spam in January 2008, when 250m spam messages were being pumped out, where the message HTML appeared to be a Hotmail welcome message; anyone opening the message was offered Viagra.
ACTION: Implementing Action 3 ensures that you don’t receive emails such as this. Occasionally one may slip through, if so it is immediatly obvious it’s spam … and you just hit delete key.
