PDF Spam Makes a Comeback

As per the recent news, the PDF spam that disappeared from the hacking world in the month of July last year (2007) has emerged again. The news was reported by managed service provider MX Logic. The service provider, however, is taking every possible measure to track the emergence of the PDF spam being transmitted into the inboxes as unwanted messages.

Director of Threat Management at MX Logic, Sam Masiello, said that in the month of January this year (from January 21 to January 27, 2008) the PDF spam accounted for less than 0.5% of the global volume of spam messages. But the emergence of PDF spam once again points to the fact that the spammers might be trying or testing the file format against some of the spam filters, according to news reported by Searchsecurity on January 28, 2008.

According to MX Logic researchers, it is not yet understood whether the PDF spam is a system malfunction or spammers are setting the stage for launching these spam PDF messages on a huge scale. The scenario seems a bit gloomy as the spam messages, which are almost zero since past five months (August 2007), have appeared again; hence, this is something really

In the month of July 2007, PDF became a format that was widely being followed by the business people to send their documents. And that was the reason security researchers got tricked with the newly developed security scam. To detect the spam messages more efficiently and also to sort out the authentic ones, the spam filtering vendors have developed many ways. It took not even a month from the discovery of PDF spam by security firms when they noticed a complete wash out of PDF spam messages from the scenario.

As compared to the previous spam messages which were based on the theory of pump and dump stock scheme, the spam messages detected during January 21 to January 27 2008, were far more easily detectable as they are all in the form of pharmaceutical advertisements.

Moreover, MX Logic disclosed that malevolent code this year, which is being distributed by spam, is indicating the extension of trend of blended threat from cyber criminals to dupe unsuspecting users.

Related article: PDF flaw gets fixed with Adobe patch

» SPAMfighter News - 2/6/2008