Microsoft Involved in Spam Campaigns

The spammers are tending to use more and more advanced techniques in order to trick the consumers into visiting a malicious website or just to advertise their products. Following the recent evolution to the PDF files, the attackers are now using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, .XLS format, containing adverts to all kinds of products. McAfee reports today that a new XLS spam campaign is currently assaulting millions of email inboxes, targeting .de or .com domains. Although it is possible to receive the stand-alone Microsoft Excel file, some of the spammers are distributing the attachment as a ZIP archive.

Security company McAfee says that this new spam campaign is very similar with the one reported last month when the attackers were attaching PDF files in order to trick the users into opening the message. However, the spammers will probably evolve even more and will attach other types of documents such as Microsoft Word or PowerPoint presentations.

"During the last month as .PDF based spam has been increasing, .GIF/.JPG based image stock spam has decreased from about 20% of all spam to less than 10%. Overall the amount of 'pump and dump' stock spam is decreasing, this may be due to a combination of potential 'investors' becoming wise to these type of scams, law enforcement officials targeting this type of spam, and spammers having to continually change their spamming tools to avoid spam filters," Nick Kelly wrote on the official blog of McAfee.

Just like usual, you're advised to avoid opening untrusted messages coming from unknown sources and to refuse clicking on XLS attachments unless you're sure they are not dangerous. Also, you're encouraged to keep your antivirus solutions up-to-date with the latest virus definitions in order to avoid getting infected by all kinds of threats attached to the messages distributed through your inbox.