Endpoint Protection

When it comes to sports, entertainment, celebrities, or movies, the online community is always a passionate audience. In some cases, fans of certain teams or specific celebrities follow the news months in advance of a movie release or a big game. Spammers (always the opportune bunch) love to use these movies or events to attract users to open up spam emails and to convince them to take an action like installing a malicious program. We are now seeing the upcoming National Football League’s Pro Bowl game being added to the existing list of holidays and events, when spammers love sending unsolicited emails to users.

 

We are currently monitoring a spam campaign promoting enhancement pills using Pro Bowl 2010 related info in the subject line. Spammers expect that users will be lured into opening these emails and perhaps buy the advertised "medicines," too. 

 

Example image of the message:
 

 

This also coincides with the legitimate sale of tickets for the Pro Bowl. So, we are also seeing that most subjects are related to sale of tickets. Here are a few examples of the subject lines:

 

 

At present we are observing only the meds campaign around the Pro Bowl 2010. However, we have seen in the past that this can transform into another form of spam category too. Symantec will keep a close watch on variations in the attack relating to this sporting event and keep our readers informed.