With Memorial Day just around the corner, we at McAfee Labs are already seeing the expected spams coming in. It is a common practice of spammers and cybercriminals to use holidays as a lure in their schemes; Memorial Day is no different. In reality, many spamming campaigns lead to the same websites, such as the one pictured below:
You will quickly notice a few things on this particular “Canadian” pharmacy website. Notice the well-placed Memorial Day branding in the upper-right corner. This can be easily adjusted for the holiday at hand and hence is very reusable and timely. Also notice that this site is caught by our SiteAdvisor technology, which gives the following warning:
I happened to arrive at this site via a fake YouTube email, but we see this link and the associated Memorial Day labeling used by quite a few campaigns:
This lure comes disguised as a warning from YouTube about an illegal video that has been posted. As should be obvious, this is not from YouTube! The links are fake and if you were to hover a mouse over them, you would see the links to the pharmacy websites. Make sure you stay vigilant around the holidays and expect to see these types of social engineering tactics. Use safe browsing technologies and keep all your security software up to date.
Stay educated. Stay updated. Stay safe.
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