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Spammers are increasingly using "out of office" features in web-based
email to relay junk messages, security experts warned today. McAfee
Avert Labs reported several instances where spammers set up web-based email accounts and configured auto responders with spam messages.
The scammers then send email with fake "from" addresses to their newly
created web mail accounts. The "from" addresses subsequently receive
the spam "out of office" notices.
McAfee noted that, while this may sound like a convoluted way to send spam, it allows the fraudsters to trick spam filters.
An automatic reply from a well-known web-based email service will look legitimate to many spam filtering tools.
In
addition, unlike spam sent by botnets, the auto reply spam will have a
legitimate sender and will be signed with the correct signatures used
to sign email messages, such as DKI or Sender ID.
The
auto-responder spam does not look like a typical out of office reply.
The message subject always contains "Re:" because it is added by the
web mail service, but the spammer controls the rest of the subject line
and the message body text.
"In recent weeks we have seen an
increasing amount of spam apparently sent by legitimate web-based email
systems," said Jeremy Gilliat, an anti-spam engineer at McAfee.
"I
suspect the spammer has a program that automatically creates accounts
and sets the responder text, all with no manual work required. This
gives the spammer lots of web-mail accounts, all used to spam lots of
people."
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