Spam keeps changing. I thought I’d anecdotally highlight some recent trends we’re seeing in spam:
– Fake university degree offers appear to be way up.
– A new type of spam which pushes affiliate links. The look is always the same — green link text, simple headline.
This one pushes AdultFriendFinder:
This one pushes an adult site, again apparently using an affiliate ID.
– Malware-pushing spam is still pandemic. Various interesting subject lines, and even resorting to outright begging:
And so on…
– The plague of “me”: Another very popular spam going around these days is an email with an attachment (usually about 40k–50k in size), featuring a picture of this girl:
The spammers don’t put any extension on the file, which is named “me”. However, it is a jpeg format file.
(This is just a baiting tactic to lure the recipient into a scam.)
Otherwise, for the most part, it’s still the same old fake luxury goods and “Cialis/Viagra/cheap meds” garbage, along with the usual extraordinary amount of spam promising the enlargement of a particular male body part.
Alex Eckelberry