Spammers are using thousands of Google accounts to camouflage their scams from antispam filters, a security researcher said Friday. He dubbed the practice "Spam
2.0." (Learn more about antispam products from our Antispam Buyer's Guide)
Rather than inserting links to the actual pages touting their products, some junk mailers are sticking in links from domains
registered with Google Page Creator -- the search engine's free Web page maker -- or accounts with Google's Blogger.com service,
said Dan Hubbard, vice president of security research at Websense.
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"They'll send out a big long spam run, and include the URL they registered with Google Page or a blog service," said Hubbard.
"But there's nothing on that page but a bunch of obfuscated JavaScript." The JavaScript simply redirects the user to the actual
destination, where the spammer shills his products or services.
The tactic has been used my malware makers, but it has only recently been adopted by spammers, said Hubbard. Websense first
noticed the technique in November, but "it was only earlier this month that it showed up in numbers." Websense has been intercepting
"tens of thousands" of such e-mails daily, he claimed.
"Sometimes we'll see a run where they 'taste' the real URL, and then they'll do a much larger spam run with the Google Page
URLs," said Hubbard, explaining how the spammers seem to be testing the efficacy of each. "It appears that they believe they
get a more effective hit rate with the Google URLs."
That's likely, since most spam filters don't blink at letting through messages with embedded links to Google's services, Hubbard
said. "It's a great way for them to hide [the fact that the message is] spam, and a good way for them to get it through filters."
The spammers have borrowed other parts of the ploy from malware authors, too. Just as some recent attacks have been launched
using frequently-changing JavaScript, the redirect code placed on the Google Pages or on blogs can fluctuate, depending on
the originating spam message. The scams are also using fast-flux techniques to rapidly change the resolving destinations of
the links, said Hubbard.
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