Spammers’ Using ‘From’ Field in E-mails to Bypass Filters

As per the most recent news published by eweek on December 19, 2008, security specialists say that spammers have apparently exhausted from all techniques of injecting their unwanted marketing slogans into e-mail headlines as well as message bodies since they have fitted to beat most of the spam filters. In reality, it appears that spammers are now concentrating on e-mail 'sender' zones to present their advertisements to end-users.

Anti-Spam Research Engineer at Trend Micro, Mary Ermitano, said that the company's team of security researchers had received samples of spam mails that typically announced, "the recipient has won a huge amount of money in lottery". However, there is one difference in these e-mails that is scammers inserted their deceptive content into the 'from' area rather than into the 'subject' or into the message itself, as reported by SC MAGAZINE on December 19, 2008.

The news reports further state that the security researchers at Trend Micro realized that spammers were using the new trick to elude anti-spam filters. Furthermore, the reports state that while spam filters are designed to scour everywhere for typical patterns of spam content, the 'from' area is largely disregarded until now, as per the experts.

Ermitano also reveals that the spammers applying the new tactic are doing it to bypass anti-spam products. An analysis of the sample spam mail via text editor shows that the 'from' area is virtually a common field where scam message content is found. The anti-spam products might already be stopping the flow of e-mails when they detect similar content in their 'Subject' areas or in the text bodies, but they would allow passage to e-mails whose 'from' area might bear the fraudulent content, as reported by eweek on December 19, 2008.

Consequently, a lot of the e-mails has good chances to reach computer users, and proliferate, whatever attacks they might carry. Also, it might appear that every time some strategy is applied to reduce the speed of spam, spammers would come up with a new tactic to bypass filters, experts point out via a statement.

Related article: Spammers Continue their Campaigns Successfully

» SPAMfighter News - 1/1/2009