An odd increase in the number of spam ploys has been noticed amidst the usual threats brought by the upcoming holidays – that are, oddly enough, not even related to this yuletide season.

It is ” dating spam” with one of the most common techniques there are — same contents in plain text inviting the recipient to chat and an email address having the same domain. After further analysis, it was confirmed that this dating spam has been seen around a few days ago, and that the domain used in this spam run was just created the day after it was discovered.

Figure 1. Sample dating spam

Figure 2. Another sample

Although these spam runs do not appear to be related to any malware activity, this shows that spammers today are not just necessarily jumping into every seasonal angle for their spam runs. Since more and more users are now knowledgeable of their usual tactics, it’s possible they’ve figured it’s time to change their style.

All spam emails are already detected by the Email Services Reputation through the Trend Micro Smart Protection Network.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!