Spam Comes in Disguise to Saleforce.com Users

SalesForce.com's users face a tough time as hackers are sending them spam messages in the shell of Identity Confirmation feature. The changed tactics by the spammers is an attempt to outsmart those features and products that are designed to get rid of junk mails and phishing attacks.

The phishing attack that has trapped the Salesforce.com users is amongst the newly developed techniques introduced by the spammers.

Vice President of Product Management of Barracuda Networks, Stephen Pao, said that the new strategies invented by the hackers throws light on its developed social engineering skills, as reported by TMCnet.com on January 10, 2008. Pao further added that the irony of the whole incident is the identity confirmation feature, which has come as a blessing in disguise for the spammers, was introduced by the SalesForce.com team to enhance and improve the security and safety of its users against the phishing attacks. The attack has been manipulated by the hacker so cleverly that whoever is unaware of their strategy will instantly download the malware into his system because of its clever design.

The planned attack on the salesForce.com users' is like any other malware attack that targets the Internet users to hack their username and password just by making them install the malware into their system. The obtained passwords can then be utilized by the hackers to obtain information related to the user's bank account, credit card details, shopping websites, or details concerning salesforce.com itself.

The CEO of Barracuda, Dean Drako, said, as reported by InformationWeek.com on January 10, 2008, that the latest trend which has been identified by the Barracuda engineers shows that short messages containing few words are sent as a spam to the users, as less content is tough to filter. It happens that in many cases, e-mail containing small messages acts to lure the users to the core.

As per the annual report of Barracuda Networks that was published in the first half of January 2008, around 95% of the e-mail messages that were sent in the year 2007 were spam. The statistics shows an alarming increase when compare with the data of the year 2001 when only 5% spam e-mails were sent.

Related article: Spam Scam Bags a Scottish Connection

» SPAMfighter News - 1/29/2008