August 9th, 2007 at 1:21 pm
Have you noticed a jump in spam lately? I know I have. Heck, even my wife has, and she has fairly good email practices (doesn’t leave it lying around the ‘net for people to spam). Turns out that there is a massive spam surge going on right now, that is part of a massive pump and dump to pump up the stocks of a business called Prime Time Group which operates in Florida. Each piece of mail comes with a .pdf which tries to pump up the stock. According to Sophos, this pump and dump scheme is different in the size and scale of the spam, which, apparently, tremendous — and it must be, if its overwhelming gmail’s spam-catching capabilities. [tip: Computerworld]
August 9th, 2007 at 2:16 pm | Permalink
I would comment, but I’m too busy cleaning the spam out of my inbox and blog.
But seriously, there has been a huge surge on both fronts. My girlfriend has been complaining of the same thing about her work email, which she uses for nothing but work purposes.
August 9th, 2007 at 2:57 pm | Permalink
I thought it was just me, imagining things again. I certainly did notice the new style of spam — PDF attachment to a message from what looks like a real person, either with no subject line or one that sounds legit. I get about 20 of them a day and haven’t opened a single one. I’m so out of touch sometimes — thought they might have found a way to put a cross-platform virus in a PDF. Thanks for revealing the big secret.
(They can’t put a Mac virus in a PDF, can they?)
August 9th, 2007 at 3:27 pm | Permalink
Thanks Tony, I hadn’t really noticed until the last couple days. I’ve been waking up wondering why I suddenly had so much email- now I know. For a minute I thought I was really cool…oh well.
August 9th, 2007 at 4:46 pm | Permalink
Chris — you’ll always be cool to me. ;)