14 DAY TRIAL // Marshal's Threat Research and Content Engineering Team revealed in a press release via IT Backbones that it has identified a new breed of spam camouflaged into Microsoft Word documents. Marshal's TRACE team has initially identified the spam campaign on August 17, 2006 and has consequently detected in excess of 100 such examples. The security company has described the modus operandi of the campaign as being generated from a botnet. The unsolicited emails comprise several elements that point to a business subject and a Word file attachment. While the message in the actual email is constructed to bypass anti-spam filters, the attached Word document reveals a spam content.
"Spammers have traditionally avoided emailing spam as an attached Word document because not everyone has Word and the it makes the size of the email larger than normal, making it less efficient to distribute in large volumes," said Bradley Anstis, Director of Product Management for Marshal. "However spammers now realise that fewer regular spam messages are getting through anti-spam filters. They are turning to new ways of trying to circumvent them. In this case, they are accepting the penalty of increasing the message size in order to get more spams through the filters."