MXSweep Reports MP3 Spam Attack

MXSweep reports on massive outbreak of MP3 spam by stock market pump-and-dump fraudsters. This brand new type of email borne spam has been flooding users since last week, and in a very short time accounted for around 7 – 10% of all spam sent worldwide. These worthless stocks are being promoted as MP3 based voice messages with deceptively sounding names like Santana.mp3, bspears.mp3 or coolringtone.mp3.

(PRWEB) October 27, 2007 — MXSweep reports on massive outbreak of MP3 spam by stock market pump-and-dump fraudsters. This brand new type of email borne spam has been flooding users since last week and in a very short time accounted for around 7 – 10% of all spam sent. These worthless stocks are being promoted as MP3 based voice messages with deceptively sounding names like Santana.mp3, bspears.mp3 or coolringtone.mp3.

The messages themselves are much larger than "traditional" spam, even larger than image spam and PDF spam. On average, the size of the message range from 85 KB up to 147KB. For the most part message contents are empty with subject headers containing just "Fwd:" or "Re:", or the name of the file attachment. File names have been categorized as emotional for example: dadsong.mp3, oursong.mp3, weddingsong.mp3, well-known artists and songs, for example: santana.mp3, sayyousayme.mp3, smashingpumpkins.mp3, or other "sounds" that people might want to listen to, for example: answeringmachine.mp3, coolringtone.mp3, listentothis.mp3

This represents yet another evolutionary step in email spam. For years we had grown accustomed to text based spam, a format still in widespread use today, then came a global outbreak of emails carrying image spam based on GIF or JPEG formatted graphic payloads, with spammers then switching to PDF & Excel attachment spam, and now for the first time we are seeing more spam campaigns based on MP3 based spam. Each evolutionary advance poses a tougher challenge to the anti-spam industry as traditional filters struggle to keep up.

According to Danny Jenkins, MXSweep CTO and founder, "Spammers are using new techniques everyday to penetrate spam filters, and as their methods become more and more advanced traditional keyword and baysion filters are becoming less effective in the global fight against spam." As the keynote speaker at an MXSweep Reseller Conference in Dublin today, Danny told the audience, "The vast majority of businesses are already blocking audio files or will have no issues implementing corporate policies to block audio files from arriving by email into the user's inbox. Although these emails now account for 8% of current traffic they consume up to 55% of email bandwidth use, which in business terms is a huge additional cost. By using the MXSweep hosted email filtering service, MXSweep advanced spam filtering allows business to block the latest spam threats including MP3 spam, without the need to implement overzealous policies. In addition, all of the filtering in performed in the cloud so the additional bandwidth requirement is not an issue for the customer. "

About MXSweep:
MXSweep provides a comprehensive suite of hosted email security services, including Anti-Virus, Anti-Spam and Anti-Fraud capabilities for server and network protection. Taking less than one hour to deploy, MXSweep's managed service protects companies and employees against the liabilities of spam and viruses transmitted over email. MXSweep's threat management services help companies increase the availability and reliability of their email and IT infrastructure. Headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, MXSweep serves the international market through a global network of channel partners.
The company has been awarded Premium Checkmark Certification status by the independent West Coast Labs on the strength of MXSweep's ability to block all email-borne spam, fraud, phishing, and identity theft attempts, as well as viruses, and mail server attacks. Applying multiple layers of perimeter protection technologies across a clustered network of secure data centres, the MXSweep email protection service provides the comprehensive and accurate filtration required to purify today's business email from all threats. The service is popular with organisations of all sizes, ranging from SME/SMB sector businesses right up to large multi-national corporates and government departments. The MXSweep solution is a fully managed service with 24/7 monitoring to guarantee system availability. Market demand for MXSweep's email protection continues to increase, with international sales increasing at double digit rates.

 

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