Spam Scam Offers ‘Prostitute’ Finder, Warns Sophos

A recent spam scam is offering an online system to find prostitutes, warn security researchers.

The spam mail does not contain any malware and the Web site it links to does not either have a malicious code. Despite that users could land up in major trouble by following the link in such types of e-mails, says Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos.

The risk is that users acting dumbly and clicking on such types of links could be playing with real danger. Although the site apparently is non-malicious but there are chances it had hosted malware in the past. People should realize that responding to spam mails only emboldens spammers to send further spam - something that all e-mailers dislike, said Cluley. InformationWeek published Cluley's reasoning as news on May 8, 2007.

The spam mail shows a subject line as "finding a girl in your town", and contains a graphic that has a Web link. As per many sentences of the random text message, recipients need to type the URL on the Web browser. According to an advisory, researchers at Sophos noted that spammers frequently use both features to evade not very sophisticated anti-spam programs.

Cluley thinks the e-mail demonstrates pimps too as familiar with the Internet as any other user. There have been a lot of pornographic spam e-mails previously but selling goods made of 'flesh and blood' has been rare, according to Cluley. Crn Australia published this in news on May 9, 2007.

Sophos, in March 2007, warned of some kind of spam e-mails that purported to make free pornography available to recipients. The e-mails contained phrases like 'hot photos from my birthday'. They also included a URL, which directed the user to a malicious site hosting a Trojan program called Pushu-A. The Trojan was designed to steal users' personal information from their infected PCs.

Sophos said the Web site encouraged visitors to download what they thought would be hardcore adult images in an archive folder. But in the ongoing investigations, experts at SophosLabs found photographs, which neither related to the spam e-mails not to the malware in the site.

Related article: Spam Scam Bags a Scottish Connection

» SPAMfighter News - 5/17/2007