Spammers Making Spam Mail
If you check your email every day, chances are you notice different spam mails in your inbox every day—and maybe you have tried various methods of keeping those emails away. Perhaps you have set up email filters to block specific email senders from your inbox. Maybe you have even taken the extra step to get spam protection of some kind. However, you are likely noticing that there are still spam mails showing up on a daily basis.
Why Spam Mails Won’t Go Away?
Spammers are dedicated. The people and companies who send out the spam mails make a lot of money off of these emails; therefore, they aren’t going to simply admit defeat and stop sending out spam mails once one of their emailing methods is blocked from most inboxes. They aren’t going to simply throw in the towel and give up a very lucrative source of income.
So, spammers simply change their methods. They figure out new ways in which to try to get people to click on their emails.
What Spammers Do?
Spammers change their tactics. The emails that they send out are targeted to be timely. The spam mails have titles that include the names of currently hot celebrities or popularly prescribed medications, for instance. Or, they may mention names of new movies or television shows or any other word or phrase that they think could attract people to click. Political spam mails are often sent out close to elections, for example. Credit card offers and freebie offers are always prevalent.
Besides changing the titles of their emails spammers also transform their entire spam mail campaigns. They have to, really—the good spam protection programs quickly figure out how the spammers have designed an email campaign and develop a means to quash it. So, since a great many computer users have spam protection these days, spammers have to find new schemes for their spam mails.
A Sample Spam Mail Scheme
Very recently there have been spam mails going around that promise to show the reader naked pictures of celebrities. Specific popular celebrities—such as Angelina Jolie, Miley Cyrus, and Britney Spears, among others—are named in these emails. Unsuspecting receivers of these emails click on these emails and see that they are supposed to visit a webpage that is said to contain naked video clips of their favorite stars.
Upon visiting that webpage, though, visitors don’t see naked video clips—instead they see what looks like a video player that leads to a binary executable file. The visitors are told that they must download an ‘update’ for Adobe’s Flash player.
However, the link on which the visitors click is not for Adobe’s Flash player—it is for malware. The file starts downloading automatically, installing even more pieces of malware.
This type of spam mail campaign targets people who are not knowledgeable about computer security. It also targets people who are really into celebrities—so much so that they tend to ignore common sense just to see anything related to their favorite star.
