Gibberish Spam
September 15th, 2008
The global email and spam volumes on September 11 last week climbed to the record levels that we have not seen since late March of this year. Volumes have been decreasing during spring and summer after the March records, but began rising again in August and September. The increase on September 11, however, was so significant that the TrustedSource reputation sensors detected a 15% increase from previous days earlier last week.
Several spam campaigns have been contributing to this growth worldwide with the usual suspects including the spam for male enhancement products, replica products, pharmacy marketing, and mortgage products. Among them however is a new spam attack that has caught the attention of our researchers.
The spam emails appear to have no obvious purpose since they don’t contain any website links or actual contain other than the random character strings in subject and body.
Customers have been contacting Secure Computing this week with questions on why these types of messages would be sent and what purpose it could possibly serve to the spammers. We tend to see these types of random gibberish campaigns every 4-6 months. One potential explanation could be that the spammers are testing the quality of their harvested email address books to determine the number of real recipients they can deliver spam to. It could also be caused by a bug in the spam sending software that corrupts the mail it’s supposed to send and results in gibbersish. Whatever the cause, one thing is almost certain - as we enter the fall and holiday season, an increase in spam is virtually inevitable. And while we may see some unusual mailings like this one, the majority of the increased spam will undoubtedly have a specific malicious/financial intent - it will either attempt to steal your personal or financial information or peddle some product of dubious origins and value (which, should you buy it, will almost always also result in your credit card number being swiped and sold on the criminal underground market)
Back to TrustedSource™ Blog overview
