In the wake of the latest PDF / ZIP spam surge, many security analysts and vendors have taken a shot at explaining this phenomenon. It is the case of GFI Software who released an interesting whitepaper called "Attachment spam – the latest trend".

The paper begins with a bit of history in the evolution of spam which could explain why we got to this point today where more than 25% of all spam is carried trough email attachments.

Most of this spam is used for pump-and-dump scams involving the stock market and there is a constant battle between the cyber crooks and the anti-spam companies.

The chronological evolution of this kind of spam was : 

• Embedded images
• Attached PDF, Excel, Word
• Zipped attachments containing the PDF, XLS, DOC

The solution lies in a product that deploys as many anti-spam techniques as possible, including Bayesian filtering and filtering for images/text embedded in different file-type attachments, while at the same time maintaining false positives at a minimum.

Download Attachment spam – the latest trend (PDF)

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