Beware bird flu spam hawking medicine and stocks
Sadly, people have to be warned about crap like this. Why can’t people get the hint: all spam is bad and possibly dangerous, not just to your computer but possibly you! Some jerks are making tons of money off you silly people who click the links and keep these buggers in business. For the sake of all ‘net-kind, please stop! Ah, who am I fooling… On to the point of this post…
I just read the “Spammers Jump On Bird Flu Bandwagon” article over at SecurityPipeline.com. It’s an important read and good info to pass on to Internet newbies and the consistently naive everywhere!
Spammers are playing off avian flu fears to shill pharmaceuticals and pitch stocks, a security firm said Wednesday.
U.K.-based Sophos warned users that its honeypots — purposefully unprotected PCs set up to trap spam samples — have been capturing a rising number of messages peddling Tamiflu, the Roche-made drug that reduces symptoms of the H5N1 strain of the bird flu virus.One spam example that Sophos cited starts out “Bird flu case discovered in the USA” to stoke fears and prod people into buying Tamiflu from a Web site. The statement’s not true; no confirmed cases of the avian flu have yet been found in the United States.
When did common sense become extinct? Isn’t it pretty obvious that you shouldn’t go buying medicine at some random website, especially one you read about in a spam message? Can’t you do a little research at CNN.com or MSNBC.com to confirm if the USA is seeing an outbreak of a certain disease or not, at least before believing a spam you received? Gosh!!!
The article goes on to warn about spam being used to pump-and-dump stocks. Once again, this is incredible to me that people actually take investment advice from unsolicited e-mail (aka spam).
Sophos also tracked a separate spam campaign that used the mounting concern of a possible flu pandemic to pump-and-dump stocks. The spammers, said Cluley, use spam to talk up the stock of a company claiming to have recently announced disinfectant products effective against bird flu.
“Spammers are spreading realistic-looking short term ‘investment advice’ in the hope of pumping a stock enough to offload their own shares at a profit,” explained Cluley. “The increasing quantity and sophistication of pump-and-dump campaigns suggests that there is plenty of money to be made [by the spammers].”
Please just tell everyone you know that the bird flu isn’t a concern in the US right now and remind them that spam is the devil.
Source: http://www.securitypipeline.com/172900721