Spammers Prefer Big Names to Other Subjects

The Secure Computing TrustedSource Research Team analyzed the Top Ten Celebrity Spam Topics in its recent Major Spam Trends report and spotted e-mail that lead to a new Website malware presenting news on Angelina Jolie as lure and occupied number one place on the list.

Furthermore, nine other big names earned top positions as topics for spam attacks. Barack Obama and Paris Hilton occupying the second and third spots respectively while Britney Spears, Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush came in at the fourth, fifth and sixth positions. Trailing the US president was Jessica Simpson in the seventh slot and Bin Laden in the eight. Finally, the ninth and tenth spots went to Brad Pitt and Michael Jackson respectively.

The Secure Computing report further revealed that a surprising 2.28% of the daily global e-mails include Angelina's name with subject lines like "Angelina Jolie nude movie", "Angelina Jolie naked video" and "Angelina Jolie naked."

Moreover, the Angelina Jolie spam campaign carries a URL leading to a binary mainly seen as the msvideoc.exe executable hosted at a number of domains. Security researchers active scanning recognized it as Trojan.Crypt.XPACK.GEN.

Also, according to the report, since the start of July 2008, constant waves of bulk mailings have been hitting users' mailboxes with bogus invoices. For instance, the phony UPS e-mails claimed that a parcel could not be delivered and therefore, user need to print an invoice, attached with the message and collect the parcel now. The invoice, however, contained malware.

Further, there have been more of these types of counterfeit e-mails circulating on the Internet. For example, an e-mail in German language pretended to be a PayPal invoice from Europe while another claimed to come from the US Custom Service.

Finally, a new version of an e-mail was found in the wild that install the Storm Trojan. This one declared that the "Amero" would take the place of the US dollar. The message reached recipients with the headline - "The Amero currency replacing the Dollar". But the e-mail through various clicks leads the user to an executable named amero.exe, which actually carries the Trojan.

Related article: Spammers Continue their Campaigns Successfully

» SPAMfighter News - 8/20/2008