What Olympic Spam?

While The Test Center heard alot about Olympic spam --messages with Olympic-related topics appearing in the subject line, the body, or the attachments -- very little of it ended up on Test Center's servers.
MessageLabs and Symantec both released reports recently on this topic.

Symantec reported an increase in spam campaigns targeting the U.S. presidential candidates and the Beijing Olympics in August's State of Spam report. Looking at spam traffic for July, the company said the spammers sent emails taking advantage of the interest surrounding the Olympics (Subjects included "Beijing postpones Olympics due to McCain-Dalai Lama meeting"). In these spam attacks, the recipient is asked to click on a link that downloads malware. MessageLabs reported an attack where malware was hidden within an Adobe Acrobat PDF file attachment. When the attachment was opened, embedded JavaScript downloaded an executable program on to th...

» Channel Web - Fahmida Y. Rashid - 13-08-2008