We had earlier blogged about spammers abusing different social networking websites and taking full advantage to host their spam on them. Recently researchers at McAfee Labs came across a new spam campaign where yet another BIG social networking website, YouTube, is being abused.
As we know, YouTube is a video sharing website on which users can upload and share videos. During a recent spam campaign, we saw that Russian spammers had created a spam video and are hosting it on YouTube. This new spam trend, to host spam videos, could possibly alarm other regional spammers and as a result we may see spam videos in various other languages including English, Chinese, and German etc.
Some of the subjects lines read as:-
Subject: ВАША РЕКЛАМА МОЖEТ БЫТЬ ЗДЕСЬ
Subject: Служба e-mail раccылок
Translated to English:-
Subject: Your advertisement can be here
Subject: Service for e-mail distribution
The mail body was short with a link to YouTube, users who might have clicked on the URL would have watched a small video of approximately 36 seconds in which two guys were conversing in Russian and at the end of the video the spammer had inserted information like telephone and ICQ numbers to reach them.
Translated to English:-
Widespread distribution – http://www.youtube.com/watch?Text has been removed
The text on the video was some what like this:-
Массовые рассылки реклама в интернет. [This text in Russian was seen as a heading for sequence 2]
Translated to English:-
Mass mailing advertisement on the Internet.
Here are other recent spam details:
1) Russian spam mails are seen with obfuscated phone and icq numbers at the end of the mail
2) The opt-out option is missing in Russian mails
3) The mail is generally short with a single URL
4) Russian words in the mail body are also obfuscated
5) The mail body text is multi-colored
6) Typical spammed categories for Russian mails are: Adult, lease, educational and service/product promo
Finally, don’t click any URLs or links in a suspicious e-mail and most importantly stay up-to-date with software patches.
