MPP and Beyond

MPP’s business partner, Commtouch, reports some interesting stats on the explosion of pdf spam that has caught many spam vendors flat footed once again. The Commtouch Detection Center reported yesterday that PDF spam spiked during the previous 24 hours, making up 10-15% of all spam messages. Given the fact that these messages are nearly 4x bigger than ’standard’ spam messages, this increased overall global spam traffic by 30-40%.

The new technique of sending spam messages as a PDF attachment first appeared about 2 weeks ago and got some press as a ‘new and novel’ type of spam. Now we can confirm that is has been adopted by spammers on a wide scale.

The popularity of the PDF format for legitimate business communications makes it difficult for traditional anti-spam solutions to block effectively, without causing massive false positives. And the spammers have noticed how easy it is to bypass anti-spam engines, and for the most part have stopped trying to “hide” their messages with funky fonts and colors, and are sending what appears like standard business letters via PDF (until you notice that they are selling organ enhancers, or stock tips ;).

I refer you to the article published in yesterday’s Computerworld: Israeli security firm reports huge spike in PDF spam.

Technorati Tags: pdf spam, spam, mpp, commtouch, email security, email