"Nodding the head does not row the boat"

Irish Saying
(August 9, 1803, Robert Fulton U.S. engineer and inventor gets done sail a steamboat on the Seine)

New Flash spam

A new spam tactic has proliferated over the last few weeks which consists of sending junk mail with links to Macromedia Flash files that automatically redirect to a spammer site. You can see an example of these emails here.

The process is as follows: the email includes a link which, instead of calling a web page, takes users to a Flash file with a .swf extension. The file is hosted on legitimate image-hosting sites like flickr, Picaza, etc., so the spam URL won't be detected as malicious. This allows the junk email to bypass some anti-spam filters.

When the user clicks on the link they will be taken to the Flash file, which, in turn, redirects them to a web page used for advertising products: medicines, pornography, online casinos, etc.

"So far, this technique has only been used to take users to web pages that sell products through spam, however, it could also be used to take user to web pages that distribute malware", says Luis Corrons, technical director of PandaLabs.

For more information about this new technique click here

For more information about spam, click here