Spam Reports

Fergie's MP3 Files Asking For Money

It's only spam

By Bogdan Popa, Security and Search Engines Editor

18th of October 2007, 10:40 GMT

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You don't have to listen to these messages

Security company Sophos discovered one new spam campaign which appears to be based on MP3 files attached to the messages asking for consumers' support for a Canadian company. The filenames are pretty attractive as they use

the names of several celebrities such as Elvis Presley, Fergie and others. According to Sophos, most of the files attached to the emails are hurricanechris.mp3, allforone.mp3, carrieunderwood.mp3, elvis.mp3, baby.mp3, fergie.mp3, and bbrown.mp3. The e-mail message encourages the users to listen to the files which contain the real advertising message usually included in the main spam mail.

In order to avoid spam filters, the spammers used an altered voice which modified some parts of the MP3s such as websites URLs.

"When you click on the MP3 file you may expect to listen to Elvis, but in fact you're hear something more like Marvin the Paranoid Android droning on about a stock that is (apparently) going to have 'he-uge success'," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos.

"Internet users may not be aware that the spammers are likely to have already purchased stock at a cheap price and are trying to artificially inflate its price by encouraging others to purchase more. The good news is that it's hard to believe that many will fall for such an amateurish presentation of an 'investor alert'."

It's pretty hard to block all these spam messages invading your inbox because they are usually based on common emails with different senders and subjects. However, the real annoying message is included in the MP3 file and even if you might expect to listen to a famous song, you're actually listening to an advertising message. Sophos sustains it's easier to filter the messages coming into your account by the format of the attachments so if you'd like to stay on the safe side, go ahead and try this trick.

TAGS:

spam | email | audio | mp3

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