Spammers using social network templates

Templates from social networking sites used to make messages appear legitimate.

According to

Symantec

, spammers are increasingly using templates from social networking sites to make their messages appear legitimate. The company also reports that the volume of Chinese language spam has increased in recent months.

With most Internet users active on one or more social networks, they are likely to recognize email notifications that appear to come from the networks they use and assume they are legitimate. Spammers take advantage of this trust by sending their messages using the same templates. Users who fall for such scams may end up on phishing sites or find themselves infected with malware.

In recent months,

Facebook

‘s template was the most popular with spammers, followed by

Twitter

and

YouTube

. However, the templates appear to be used in rotation for campaigns lasting between 15 and 20 days each.

At the same time,

Symantec

has reported a growth in spam using the Chinese language. Given the increase in Internet usage in China – whose online population has been the largest in the world for some time – this comes as little surprise. It is also little surprise to find that Chinese language spam uses the same obfuscation techniques as those used in English language spam.

The volume of spam circulating worldwide increased rapidly until a few years ago – but a number of successful attempts at taking down botnets has recently brought this rapid growth to a halt. However, rather than concentrating on quantity, spammers are now looking to improve the ‘quality’ of the spam they send – working harder on making their messages appear legitimate and targeting smaller groups of users.

More details at

Symantec

‘s blog

here

and

here

. An overview of techniques used by spammers to evade detection by spam filters can be found in

The Spammers’ Compendium

.

Posted on 30 June 2011 by

Virus Bulletin