Symantec Detects Fresh Cutwail Spam Campaign

Investigators from Symantec the security company caution that one fresh surge of spam mails is doing the rounds, while promoting "Canadian Health&Care Mall," a fake pharmaceutical provider as the e-mails originate from the Cutwail network of bots.

These e-mails formatted in HTML utilize Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) floating as well as color declarations that disguise them to appear as random text, while displaying merely the relevant portions and hiding the rest from the recipients.

Eventually the text states that while it is widely known of inexpensive medications from foreign pharmacies, the problem often encountered is getting hold of a reliable one. So now there's one reliable drugstore viz. "Canadian pharmacy" that's a trusted, experienced and wholly licensed store catering to Internet buyers, it reveals.

Meanwhile the spammers, together with utilizing text manipulation so as to get around spam filters, have as well attempted to deceive mechanisms for blocking URLs via connecting with the spam website in one Google cached edition.

The resulting web-link connects with a site namely googleusercontent.com that's probably white-listed rather than a bogus website. As a result, costs are reduced as it becomes possible to host the spam web-pages anywhere till the time they're cached, devoid of any botheration regarding them being deactivated later.

Worryingly, 'pharmaceutical spam' represents spammers' worst spam run globally, Symantec notes. This spam nearly always originates from the major botnets namely Cutwail, Donbot, Grum, and Rustock, the security company adds.

Also, researchers at Symantec further state that there has been a constant return of pharmaceutical spam ever-since October 2010 when spam affiliate initiative Spamit.com was shutdown. However, contrarily, pharma spam has always been active. As per a research paper studying January-June 2010 spam trends, published during August 2010, the Canadian Pharmaceutical spam contributed a huge 66% share in the entire world spam of that period.

Eventually, security specialists recommend that users should act intelligently and not believe these spam mails which arrive into their mailboxes. Moreover, they must maintain their security software up-to-date, while remembering to take down each of the relevant security patches towards keeping their computers safe from any infection, they advise.

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» SPAMfighter News - 12/6/2010