5 Billion "Investment News" Spam Messages Sent in Latest Outbreak

6/21/07

Yesterday a major spam campaign dispatched roughly 5 billion spam email messages in an effort to boost the stock value of a particular German firm.

The source of the original report was IronPort,

a provider of online security solutions.

The staff at SpamButcher have also noticed a significant increase in German-language finance spam over the last several days. Finance spam tapered for sometime after the FTC suspended trading of several targeted stocks. Obviously, oversees stocks are not directly accountable to America's FTC.

The report also indicated that many of the messages were sent their content embedded within PDF attachments. While this is not unprecedented, it's a common technique for spammers to use. PDF files are commonly large, which makes sending them less appealing than plain text or embedding a message within a simple image.

However, many programs to stop unwanted email simply ignore messages over a certain size on the premise they're probably not unsolicited. Using large attachments like PDF files both allows the encoding of message content, and may cause the email to bypass filtering completely.

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