Friday, 15 September 2006

Spammers Adopt New Trick to Harvest E-mail Addresses

SophosLabs has warned computer users to think before forwarding chain letters after discovering a new scam being used by spammers to collect e-mail addresses. The spammed e-mail campaign poses as a research project into chain mail and joke messages that are frequently sent between e-mail users around the world. Chain letters and jokes can easily be sent to a person's full contact list or an entire company department, ending up with valid e-mail addresses for everyone who received the message in the body of the message.

The new Spam campaign asks for chain letters to be forwarded to the spammers (who are posing as a researcher called Gemma). However, Sophos warns that rather than conducting a study of chain letters, the recipients are actually planning to gather innocent peoples' contact details for the purposes of Spam and identity theft.

"Spammers need e-mail addresses like a fish needs water. Without details of 'live' e-mail addresses they struggle to get their unwanted marketing messages in front of their potential customers," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos. "Under the pretence of 'research' spammers are trying to fool Internet users into passing on dozens of e-mail addresses with every message they forward. At best this could result in Spam being sent to all of your friends and colleagues, at worst they could be put at risk of identity theft. Computer users should break the chain and not respond to messages such as this one."

Sophos recommends that companies protect their e-mail gateways with a consolidated solution to defend against viruses, spy ware and Spam, as well as secure their desktop and servers with automatically updated protection.