Stock Spammers Using Video to Dodge Filters

Filed in archive Spam on December 31, 2007

Stock spammers have armed themselves with a new tool to get around spam filters-video. It joins past filter fooling schemes like pdf and image spam. Symantec reports that they had samples of spam that included a link to a high quality video hawking stocks from a uranium exploration company.

"The online video streaming is about 30 seconds long, with very crisp and clear sound, and the video quality is very impressive," noted Jitender Sarda, a Symantec analyst, on the security vendor's blog. "The video looks like a legitimate TV or online media commercial used by the company for advertisement."

Another type of spam recently seen by Symantec includes tags that direct the recipient to various video search engines, all of which bring up multiple sites containing the spam video.

"This e-mail directs the user to key words (tags) from the spam sample message," said Sarda. "The tags are then inserted into popular video search engines and usually come up with many video records uploaded with the same or similar description of the penny stock that spammers wish to promote."

The best defense is to make sure your users are only able to view streaming content from legitmate sites, and using good server based anti-spam tools to keep the spam from reaching them in the first place.