We all know to be good at Christmas, but unfortunately hardly anybody agree with that, especially in the digital world: indeed, a new form of spam is about to invade your email stocking .. and it will have Santa Claus white-whiskered face!

 Sophos labs have just published the alert about a new “seasonal” marketing trick : an email campaign offering to send children a letter from Santa Claus is actually a deceit used by spammers to obtain a number of email addresses they could use for their illicit spam-activities.

Actually the trick is very well conceived because  appealing emails with subjects such as “Letter From Santa For Your Child" or  "Santa Letter from the North Pole", offer to send personalized letters from Santa Claus to children all over the world. Even those who would not be interested in a similar “service” could  fall into the trap, indeed on the bottom of the message, a request to get in touch with the sender if the mail was received in error could cheat  several people.

The trick is particularly sly for two reasons: on the one hand it targets parents and relatives that in this period of the year are looking for ideas to make their  children’s Christmas time as “magical” as possible, and then it counts on the fact that  at Christmas people tend to be less suspicious and easier to nobble.

But as Sophos experts suggest, there’s no Christmas Time for spam and we must be as vigilant as usual.

Actually this new  idea about “how to make spam”, is the  last one in a long list of spamming activities that have been identified by  security firms worldwide: it is just like cyber criminals are gearing up for Christmas, equipping themselves with new effective weapons, as the Australian magazine CRN reported:

“A dropped variant of Warezov virus, once installed on a PC, could instruct the infected computer to download a second component, an executable file, from an IP address.”

“Usually the .exe file downloads a spam message and email addresses, turning the infected computer into a spam production house, MessageLabs senior analyst Paul Wood told vnunet.com.”

Since Warezov doesn’t need to deliver all its code during the first phase of the infecting process, it is very harder to detect by normal antivirus software.

Another instrument used by  spammers is “a spam-sending Trojan dubbed SpamThru which employs the "spam cannon" technique. This uses a template for each spam and combines it with a list of email addresses, similar to a mail merge.”

As security companies reported, October has been the worst month for spam in 2006, and according to estimations spam degree will increase again by the end of the year.

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christy Written by Guest on 2006-11-30 01:13:27

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