News & Press releases

Excel based “pump-and-dump” stock spam

MX Lab has intercepted the first Excel based stock spam messages! These messages appeared today in the afternoon local Belgian time.

During the last few days MX Lab has intercepted PDF based spam that contains the standard paragraph when sending attachments in Outlook Express. Now the PDF attachments are replaced by Excel sheets.

"Spammers leave image based spam because of the fact that good OCR technologies, fingerprinting and other techniques are on the market." says Peter Louies, manager of MX Lab. "We can expect that spammers will try other methods in the near future to get their messages delivered. This is certainly not the end of the story."

Several other email security vendors also have the capability to investigate PDFs and detect images in the PDF without any real content. By using an Excel sheet it will be more difficult or even impossible for some techniques to identify these messages as spam.

MX Lab has taken appropriate measures to intercept this new bread of spam techniques and will continue to follow up the changes we are facing today and tomorrow.