Spammers now Exploiting Yahoo and Google for their Spam Campaigns

According to researchers from Sophos the security company, cyber-criminals are sending spam mails by abusing Google or Yahoo.

Senior Security Advisor Chester Wisniewski at Sophos, who got plentiful spam mails from 'Yahoo! Groups' and 'Google Picasa,' disclosed that all were hackers' efforts for pushing "spammy" warnings. Softpedia.com reported this on October 1, 2011.

Incidentally, so far as Google Picasa's case is concerned, the abuse by spammers is simple. They create an account at random that consists of text along with a few attached images, which other members subsequently share. Consequently, the spam recipients end up getting numerous web albums via Picasa.

Moreover, since the recipient regards anything arriving in his account from the widely known image manager as harmless, the spam mail doesn't land into his junk e-mail folder rather there occur various scam attempts inundating his inbox.

However, in the case of Yahoo! Groups, the thing's more complex, though the spammers find no difficulty in exploiting the policy error.

Writing on his blog, Wisniewski notes that over the years, mailing lists have typically needed e-mail recipients to confirm that they've no objection in subscribing. Nakedsecurity.sophos.com published this on September 30, 2011.

Wisniewski wrote that Yahoo! Groups apparently had an inbuilt system to make it convenient for spammers for including anybody into a group devoid of taking consent. Gmanews.tv reported this on October 1, 2011.

The security advisor added that whenever the spammer desired for sending a message to a target, he could currently rely on Yahoo!, enclose a digital signature to the message using 'Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM), acquire authentic 'Sender Policy Framework' (SPF) records as also effectively bypass reputed anti-spam filters.

Eventually, he writes that Google has never had the above experience before, while Yahoo repeatedly becomes inadvertent and commits the mistakes, which plainly impact its images. Initially the service delivered malware, and lately Sophos found that Yahoo! was compelling charity URLs on the higher rankings among its search results. Some problems lately happened within the company that caused much harm to its operations, and it's vital that the company does something about them otherwise it'll keep failing to compete effectively.

Related article: Spammers Continue their Campaigns Successfully

» SPAMfighter News - 10/12/2011