The last we’ve seen of significant pump-and-dump attacks was the one instigated by Storm malware writers last October. Very recently it appears that spammers are pump-and-dumping again. Our honeypots were able to catch the following email messages:
The subject and body of these emails refer to Amazon.com’s surge of outages last week where users trying to access the Web site were greeted with error messages. The Register reports that bots could be responsible for this possible denial of service attack.
Notice that the above spam samples have no attachments or links so users are not really in any danger of getting their systems infected. Researchers believe this to be another instance of stock spamming, where the goal is to influence users’ perceptions on the profitability of investing on certain companies.
Despite this spam run being not malware-related, the message that Amazon might be in little trouble would likely bother investors. The success of that nifty psychological manipulation determines the overall success of this spam run.
