OMG you have got to be kidding me

[Red Squirrel]

My spam filter blocks about 99.9% of spam, RARELY do I have one make it through, and there is nearly no false positives. Its a very nicely tweaked system. Until the past few days....

Spammers are now embeding their spam message in a PDF and sending it as an email to make it look like its an email from my boss or something, its very generic so it could apply in any situation. Something like "I just finished the report, please find attached". Then they'll put their stupid viagra or home brewed drug crap in the pdf.

Anyone else notice this latelty? I don't even understand what spammers want from us. They should be thrown to rot in jail for wasting so much bandwidth and resources and costing companies so much money. Its just getting out of hand, but yet no law is made against it. Even on forums they're getting rediculously bad. So far the forum ones are total nooblets so they're easier to block but I'm sure thats about the change.

 

[stash]

Yeah I started getting those on my personal email server (Exchange 2007) last week. I haven't had much time to look into it, but it is pretty annoying. I've only gotten a handful of them in the past week though.

 

[RebateMonger]

Yeah, I've seen those on my Exchange Servers for a couple of weeks now. They are, basically, the only SPAM that gets past the IP block lists and Exchange's IMF2 filter.

Vlad Mazek (owner of ExchangeDefender) has some information on the .PDF SPAM on this blog.

"At the moment, there are also several unique characteristics to these images:

they are all 7bit encoded.
they all use a single useragent associated with the Mozilla Thurderbird mail software.
they are all blank messages with no text in the body.
the attachment matches the filename mentioned in the subject.
pdf file is a legitimate PDF file with no publishing information except for a single JPEG"

 

[mechBgon]

From McAfee/NAI's blog, it sounds like the Spammers are now using hacked encryption? http://www.avertlabs.com/resea...new-trend-on-pdf-spam/


Bigger picture: Spamming is obviously still profitable. Why? Are that many people that gullible, that they'd buy something advertised in a fuzzy picture in a PDF file from a sender who blatantly duped them into opening it? I guess so, but the mind boggles

 

[Oakenfold]

Originally posted by: mechBgon
From McAfee/NAI's blog, it sounds like the Spammers are now using hacked encryption? http://www.avertlabs.com/resea...new-trend-on-pdf-spam/


Bigger picture: Spamming is obviously still profitable. Why? Are that many people that gullible, that they'd buy something advertised in a fuzzy picture in a PDF file from a sender who blatantly duped them into opening it? I guess so, but the mind boggles

Indeed it does boggle the mind but at the same time there are still people that click on the weblink from the Chase email they received about needing to update their account information and to do so they need their Card#, CCV, and PIN# to avoid having their account frozen.

We need this stuff taught in the school system, all the dateline and news stories are not reaching everyone astonishingly enough.

 

[jadinolf]

Just started getting them.

I hate spam.

 

[Schadenfroh]

Getting hit by those as well.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Yeah sadly theres too many stupid noobs out there which drive the spam industry.

 

[montag451]

There is a pdf virus out there - only affects machines with Adobe pdf creator (I think).
So, be a little careful you folks.

 

[jadinolf]

Originally posted by: montag451
There is a pdf virus out there - only affects machines with Adobe pdf creator (I think).
So, be a little careful you folks.

Just don't open them.

I can smell them coming.

 

[Safeway]

Which is even worse since old machines take forever to load up PDFs. :| 67

 

[jadinolf]

I'm now getting one after another.

SeaMonkey has trained itself to recognize them as junk.