MPP and Beyond

MPP’s partner Commtouch has announced that there is a new rash of mp3 based antispam.

The messages are MP3 files that pump stocks and began: 21:24 GMT October 17th. The outbreak accounts for around 7-10% of all spam, globally, over the past 18 hours. The messages are much larger than “traditional” spam, about 85 KB on average, but have reached up to 147KB.

For the most part, the subjects are empty, containing just “Fwd:” or “Re:”, or the name of the file attachment.

File names are in several categories:
• Emotional ties, for example: dadsong.mp3, oursong.mp3, weddingsong.mp3
• Well-known artists and songs, for example: santana.mp3, sayyousayme.mp3, smashingpumpkins.mp3, bbrown.mp3, bspears.mp3, gloriaestefan.mp3, beatles.mp3
• Other “sounds” that people might want to listen to, for example: answeringmachine.mp3, coolringtone.mp3, listentothis.mp3

The sound quality of the recordings is very poor: 16 kbps bitrate and 11 KHz sample rate with an average length of 30 seconds. They are also highly randomized in order to avoid email filters.

Technorati Tags: antispam, commtouch, mpp, email security, mp3 spam