Spammers now sending stock spam in Excel files

First off, let me just say - I called it!

A few weeks ago spammers finally progressed from encapsulating their messages within JPG and GIFs onto using PDF files. This threw email spam filters for a loop. The development team at SpamButcher had to scramble to get on top of the problem. Word on the street has it that some of the competition still hasn't figured out what to do.

Now, spammers have moved on further. Spammers are now using Excel spreadsheets (XLS and XLW files) to carry their pump and dump spam onto end users.

Pump and dump spam is where some nefarious individual tries to artificially inflate the value of a penny-stock. Once it hits a certain value, they sell their shares. There is some indication that pump and dump scams actually work.

While business users rarely attach large image files directly to emails, large PDF and XLS files are pretty common. The authors of spam fighting software will generally hesitate before applying aggressive blocking against formats that could result in a large number of false-positives.

So, let's review what I was saying a few weeks ago:

"There are certainly other common document formats which almost anyone can view. Perhaps the next round of spam will have their 'payloads' embedded within Microsoft Word documents or Powerpoint presentations."

Now, for the record - I haven't actually seen any of these Excel junk emails first-hand as of yet. Since we have a number of addresses that effectively act as "spam traps" - we'll probably get some sooner or later. We'll wait until the messages actually show up and we're able to evaluate them effectively. If SpamButcher users are troubled by these messages, they won't be troubled by them for long.

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