Spam News

Bounce-back spam sees 2,000 percent spurt

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

The latest hot trend in spam appears to be email messages that spoof non-delivery reports (NDR), the messages users receive when their email bounces back from a non-existent email address or system failure.

Last month, spam messages resembling NDRs exploded by 2,000 percent from the rate of the first six months of the year and made up 20 percent of all spam email in August, according to email security experts at Panda Security.

NDR messages are usually legitimate, but this mail server function is being exploited by spammers using the sender's real name, Panda reported. Spam content is sent as an attachment to the fake NDR.

According to Luis Corrons, technical director of PandaLabs, "there is presently no consensus on whether NDRs are a technique to evade anti-spam filters or a collateral effect of dictionary attacks; either way, this technique is now among the most widely used."

Since most NDRs are legitimate emails and part of the mail server functionality, many traditional email filtering techniques do not detect or block them, he said.

Spam now makes up close to 90 percent of all global email, representing billions of spam messages each day. Most spam is generated automatically through botnets - networks of PCs that have been taken over by attackers.