The New Year saw an increase in global spam levels as spammers continued to take advantage of holidays and major current events in an effort to entice users to click on links in email messages. Attracting email recipients with tempting content is a popular social engineering tactic used both in spam, scams and other types of malicious attacks. The email messages are designed to have some relevance to the recipient in order to increase the chances of them unknowingly clicking on the links and visiting spam websites or potentially becoming infected in a drive-by attack.

 

Symantec’s found that the New Year event itself presented an opportune theme for spammers.  Symantec Intelligence identified a new tactic in spam emails that included URLs that related to more than 10,000 unique domain names. Each of these domains had earlier been compromised and the URLs pointed to PHP-based scripts hosted on the compromised websites, many of which referred to “New Year” in the file name. Some examples include, “HappyNewYear.php,” “new-year-link.php” or “new-year.link.php.”  The PHP scripts simply redirected the visitor to the real spam website, but the potential for malicious use also exists.



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