14 DAY TRIAL // I knew that being a sloth will do me good some day. Apparently, that's the way many more users think since - according to a research done by Sophos - laziness seems to have killed the PDF spam phenomenon. As I've seen on their site, there has been a dramatic decrease in the amount of spam e-mail using PDF file attachments to spread unwanted messages.
At the beginning, I thought that PDF spam was going to plague us for a long time since it was so hard to track it. Spam filters could not tell between wanted and unwanted messages (unless dubbing spam by IP) because the message was in the attached PDF file. Sure, it's great to bypass security measures, but it's not bound to get the spammer a response. Why? Well just think about it: You open the e-mail; "What the heck? Who is this sender? I don't know this guy? I'm closing this!" That's in the case of some users, but others will go even further: "So...what's the message? Oh, it's an attached PDF file." And from this, there are three possible reactions: 1.) "Oh man, this is taking too much... next mail!" 2.)"What the heck is a PDF file? I'm not downloading this!" 3.)"OK, let me download this!".
So as you can see, few people will actually download the PDF file, and of course, there's the possibility that they don't have the reader installed, and they will be too lazy to download it! Maybe one day, slothfulness will save the world!
So basically, this is it - they've decided to stop using PDF spam because it was inefficient. I just wish this would work with all the spam messages, but I think that people aren't lazy enough just yet! You can click on this link if you want to read more about the topic and see a cool chart regarding spam... if you're not too lazy to click that is...