OnTheNetDollars.com

The Evolution Of Spam

January 7th, 2010 |

SPAM is an e-mail received that you have not asked for, as in you have not signed up to someone’s list and asked for information from them.

I get quite a lot of spam as I’m sure everyone with their own website does, but the evolution of this spam is very worrying. Just before christmas there was an influx of facebook spam, which I am sure led to mane people’s accounts being hacked.

The spammers are getting more sophisticated and are now sending html messages and not plain text messages. This means that they can show you any url they like while hiding the real url.

I use microsoft outlook for my e-mails and if I hove over any link it shows me the real link, so I can always check if I am unsure. Today though I got a spam e-mail that shocked me. It was from my domain to my normal e-mail at that domain explaining that there had been an upgrade and I had to click the link to confirm the changes. I have posted the content at the bottom of this post with a few details blanked out for security, but I wanted you to see how believable it was. I checked the url straight away and it was a fake one, but others may not check, so I wanted to make you all aware.

The best advise I can give you to avoid this new evolution of spam is that if you are unsure about a link in an e-mail DO NOT click it.

Here is the e-mail I got, remember that the url shown has been changed to protect my security, but that also it was not the real url …

Dear user of the kellyifrah.com mailing service!

We are informing you that because of the security upgrade of the mailing service your mailbox (admin@kellyifrah.com) settings were changed. In order to apply the new set of settings click on the following link:

http://kellyifrah.com/xxx/xxx/xxx.php?email=admin@kellyifrah.com&from=kellyifrah.com&fromname=admin

Best regards, kellyifrah.com Technical Support.

Letter_ID#XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Bookmark and Share

Close Bookmark and Share This Page

Save to Browser Favorites / Bookmarks