Spammers Establish Fake URL-Shortening Services

Orome1 writes "Spammers are establishing their own fake URL-shortening services to perform URL redirection, according to Symantec. This new spamming activity has contributed to this month's increase in spam by 2.9 percentage points, a rise that was also expected following the Rustock botnet takedown in March. Under this scheme, shortened links created on these fake URL-shortening sites are not included directly in spam messages. Instead, the spam emails contain shortened URLs created on legitimate URL-shortening sites. These shortened URLs lead to a shortened-URL on the spammer's fake URL-shortening Web site, which in turn redirects to the spammer's own Web site."

Comments

Who cares about spammers

[aaaaaaargh!]

I'm getting around 50 messages of spam daily and all of them are filtered out by my spam filter. Sometimes when I'm bored I even read the spam for entertainment. To cut a long story short, I have yet to meet a person for whom spam has ever been a real problem. Do you know any 'spam victim' personally? If so, what was the problem? The spam or that person's own stupidity? Sure people get ripped off by spammers, but if there was no spam at all these people would just loose their money and get ripped off legally, by buying stupid shit they don't need, by legal online poker, etc.

IMHO anti-spam propaganda has been invented by self-proclaimed internet vigilantes in the good old Usenet days and spam never really was a serious problem -- at least not as much of a problem as those caused by the fascist laws against spammers that have been invented in some countries. My 2 cents.

(I don't deny that viruses and trojans are a problem, though. But that's another matter.)