Spammers Using Google To Evade Filters

Filed in archive Spam on January 25, 2008

According to a researcher at Websense Inc, spammers are now using thousands of Google accounts to get past spam filters. Instead of including links to the website they want people to visit, they insert a link from Google Page Creator.

"They'll send out a big long spam run, and include the URL they registered with Google Page or a blog service," Dan hubbard, vice president of security research at Websense, told Computerworld. "But there's nothing on that page but a bunch of obfuscated JavaScript."

That script redirects to the actual spam site.

"Sometimes we'll see a run where they 'taste' the real URL, and then they'll do a much larger spam run with the Google Page URLs," said Hubbard. "It appears that they believe they get a more effective hit rate with the Google URLs."

Websense first noticed this trend in November and has been intercepting tens of thousands of emails each day.