The February State of Spam Reporthighlights an interesting trend in the shift of spam moving from NorthAmerica to EMEA. The percentage of spam originating from EMEA hassurpassed that of North America, which represents a significant shiftin where the bulk of the world’s spam is “supposedly” sent from.

This trend has been observed for the past three months with aculmination in January of approximately 44% of all spam email noworiginating from Europe, versus 35.1% from North America. But is thisspam mail really originating in Europe? Although it appears that waythe very nature of spam distribution makes it difficult to accuratelypinpoint the true geographic origin the sender. Spammers often takeadvantage of tricks that allow them to mask their real location andbypass DNS block lists.

Why the...

China is a major exporter of goods and isknown for mass production of cheap products. How often do you see "Madein China" on toys, gadgets, or the latest "it" thing? Who doesn't wantto get these hot products cheap and direct from the manufacturer?Spammers are hoping that you do and have ramped up their game to gainbusiness. Below I'm going to give an outline of the recent history of"Made in China" wholesale product spam.

This spam type originated with bidding Web sites - online auctionhouses. Spammers opened accounts on these bidding sites and posted highpriced, hot products at cheap prices hoping to gain bidder interest.When a potential bidder asked a question through the site the spammerwould provide their "wholesale supplier product Web site," contactemail, and instant messaging ID for contact purposes. The email addressand IM are all registered with third party free email services.

If users don't ask questions, the spammer then sends a fake Q...

Penny stock spammers have started using ahigh definition video file format to promote stock symbols. As we comeup to the end of the year, spammers have moved quickly on using videoformats for spamming with pump-and-dump stock symbols. Traditionally inpenny stock spam, JPEG images were embedded in the email, followed byURLs that were redirected to other JPEG images. This year we havewitnessed huge rounds of PDF and MP3 file formats to promote stocksymbols.

Penny stock spammers have also used legitimate video commercials (TVand online media commercials) and clippings of professional financialnews reports or programs. Often there are conversations between thehost and the guest star "professional financial analyst," discussingthe company’s strategies and financial prospects. The following are acouple of sample messages of the penny stock spam email:

Date: Fri, 07 Dec 2007 03:21:59 -0500
From: [REMOVED]
To: [REMOVED]
Subject: Catch...

We've observed some adult spam in disguise.The usual adult spam that we see is simple text with links and adultphrases that make it quite obvious what it is. The mutation that we'verecently observed includes an email that has two parts—HTML and plaintext—where the plain text portion looks completely legitimate and infact is a portion of a legitimate newsletter of some kind. However, theheaders make it apparent that it is not from the legitimate company.

Headers:

From: Sexy Girls Waiting Live Now

Subject: Tired Of The Overpriced Cam Sites

Text body:

(click for larger image)

What...