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New Flavour of Spam - MP3 Stock Scams

Posted by Zonk on from the tastes-just-terrible dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Spammers are back with a new trick, this time round sending messages with MP3 attachments that contain the latest pump-and-dump stock scams. One sample identified by Sophos was a heavily distorted 30-second MP3 file. A synthetic female voice was used to promote a particular stock. Says Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos: 'Although the spammers seem to have a fair bit to learn about machine-generated sales patter, some companies might consider blocking all MP3s in email as a matter of course. So many music files infringe copyright, and it can be hard for a company to establish which ones are legal and which are not after they have arrived. Blocking MP3s, or at least quarantining until requested by the user, can be a good way for a company to take a proactive stance against the use of email for illegal file sharing. It also has the benefit of neutralizing this sort of spam at the same time.'"

6 of 170 comments (clear)

  1. VOIP? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Well hold on there, I've got a nice new shiny VOIP line at home, guess how the answering service works? That's right, MP3s in my email...

  2. Re:That Spam won't exist for long by LWATCDR · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Yea I wondered why I got an MP3 in my email this morning. I thought it was probably some new buffer exploit that I hadn't heard of yet. Dang I wish I had listened to it now.

    --
    See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
  3. What I want to know... by JK_the_Slacker · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ... is how they'll manage to misspell the words in an mp3?

    --
    I'm waiting for a "-1 somepeoplejustshouldn'tgetmodprivileges" meta-moderation.
  4. Re:mp3s with payload? by mikek2 · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Wow, this is creepy... I just got my first mp3 spam minutes before this article was posted. I opened it from within my sandbox'd, fully expecting to see some kind of masked virus. I was stunned to find out it was, indeed, nothing more than audio spam. Weird.

  5. Re:That Spam won't exist for long by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting
    FTP or P2P access to get their MP3s illegally

    Umm ... except for those artists and fans that use ftp and p2p services to legally distribute their works ...

  6. Re:Ugh, please don't block file types... by MichaelSmith · · Score: 2, Interesting

    gmail actually looked inside my zip file to see if there were any exe files

    For one company I exchange email with I have to pgp encrypt most types of potentially executable code, including ksh scripts, then strip the PGP headers and footers and send the raw base64. Its the only way to get it through their mail system.

    --
    http://michaelsmith.id.au