October 9th, 2007
YouTube Invitations Used to Bypass Spam Filters
By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews
I must admit this is clever and rather straight-forward. According to an alert posted by Sophos, spammers are using YouTube’s “Invite a friend” service to send out ad-laden emails. They slip right by spam filters because they originate from YouTube and have the source address of service@youtube.com.
Ads are placed within the comments section of the invitation. “Normally spammers take over innocent people’s PCs to send their unwanted messages across the internet. In this case, however, they don’t need to do that. Instead they are using a website to relay a message on to their intended audience,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos. “The criminals are hoping that by embedding themselves inside a YouTube email they will be able to slip past spam filters at the recipient’s email gateway.” Source: Sophos
We Say: Although I haven’t received one of these myself, I can see how it would work. ‘Course, it’s not likely to get a lot of responses, but slipping past the filters is 1/2 of the battle.
Tabatha says:
This is interesting. How are they accomplishing this? I’m curious of the technical specifications of this action!
October 9th, 2007 at 5:10 am
Michael Santo says:
I’m not sure. Sophos wasn’t clear on that. Maybe they make a fake acct and then write a script or something?
October 9th, 2007 at 6:47 am
steveking says:
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May 20th, 2008 at 11:33 pm