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The Friday Scam, Spam and Malware Roundup

02
Nov
2012

A little bit of a round-up as the week rumbles to a close (assuming you don’t include Saturday and Sunday, which might cause some confusion in your personal life so it isn’t really advisable):

1) An email is currently pinging across mailboxes claiming “A document was sent to you using a Xerox WorkJet Pro”.

Last seen in August, this one bounces end-users across a variety of domains including .biz, .pl and .de to name but a few in the quest to send them to a Blackhole / Cridex infection site. Blackhole emails are endlessly popular and cover the full range of subjects – they won’t be going anyway anytime soon.

2) A collection of spam accounts set up to display the wares of pretty ladies with messages retweeting links to a sort of “hot or not” style site. The accounts in question seem to have been around for a little while, so perhaps they mostly lay dormant to evade the Twitter banhammer. Much of the below also required significant quantities of “let’s blank all of this out” to make it safe for work.

Click to Enlarge

Click to Enlarge

“Move along, nothing to see here” has never been so appropriate.

Clicking the handily blanked out button takes end-users to an adult dating site with more people pulling duckfaces than you could shake a very large guide to good photography at. Bit.ly reports 172 clicks in the last hour with 145 of those coming from twitter, and 2,314 clicks in the last 24 hours with 2,106 of those originating from Twitter.

Anyone organising a speed dating service on Twitter would make a killing from the looks of things.

3) A spampost made to this very blog contained some text from the Steam Guard information page and a link back to a site regarding “free Minecraft codes”. I think we all know where this is going:

Click to Enlarge

Click all the Likes, post to your Facebook wall, fill in a survey and you absolutely, positively will end up with some sort of free Minecraft code. Or, you know, probably not. Has anybody in the history of these survey sites ever actually ended up with the promised freebie? Forgive me for being skeptical, but good luck with that one.

4) There is no 4. However, the absolutely wonderful tale of what happens when you leave 1,000 laptops in an Ethiopian village is too good to miss.

Christopher Boyd

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