 YouTube
turned into spam relay channel.
05/10/2007 |
Cyber criminals
have turned a YouTube service into a spam relay channel.
YouTube contains
a facility that allows users to invite their friends to view videos that
they are looking at or have posted. This "Invite Your Friends" system is
being used to send out a large number of spam.
The messages,
which all come from service@youtube.com, have the same appearance as a
legitimate YouTube invite, except they contain pitches for tat such as
penis pills and get-rich quick schemes instead of links to online video
tat. Both could be considered forms of junk anyway which partly explains
why cybercriminals have adopted the tactic.
YouTube’s own
Help Centre suggests that you add the service@youtube.com email address to
your white list. The spammers are keenly aware of this and as a result
they are taking advantage of this to defeat spam filters and to lower the
recipient’s guard by making it look as though the messages are coming from
a perfectly innocuous email address.
In August,
spammers used a Trojan to automatically generate large numbers of Hotmail
and Gmail accounts from which to send spam. The YouTube attack is working
on the same principle.
Sending junk mail
from compromised Windows boxes under the control of hackers has become the
most popular method to send spam over recent years. But spammers are
always looking for new techniques to ensure that their junk mail messages
get through. Before botnets entered the scene the use of insecure
corporate mail servers that provided "open relays" was widely used by
spammers. In some ways the YouTube attack put a Web 2.0 spin on an
approach that ceased to be effective, thanks to improved corporate
security such as ArmourPlate.
Source: The
Register
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