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Submitted by: Bill Hickey
NCVA List Master

NRT-0312 Spammers Manipulate YouTube to Relay Spam:

Spammers have turned to using a YouTube feature called "Invite Your Friends" as a relay channel and have been pumping out massive quantities of spam. The spam messages all have a sending address from "service@youtube.com" and appear as legitimate YouTube invitations, except they contain pitches for male enhancement pills and get-rich-quick schemes instead of links to online videos. "Spammers are doing this to defeat spam filters and to lower the recipient's guard by making it look as though the messages are coming from a perfectly innocuous e-mail address. YouTube's own Help Center suggests that users exclude the service@youtube.com email address from spam filtering. The spammers are keenly aware of this," said an official from the Marshall security firm.

In August, spammers used a trojan to automatically generate large numbers of Hotmail and Gmail accounts from which to send spam. The YouTube attack is working on the same principle, according to Marshall.

Sending junk mail from compromised Windows boxes under the control of hackers has become the most popular method to send spam over recent years. But spammers are always looking for new techniques to ensure their junk mail messages get through. Before botnets entered the scene, the use of insecure corporate email servers that provided "open relays" was widely used by spammers. In some ways, the YouTube attack puts a Web2.0 spin on an approach that ceased to be effective thanks to improved corporate security and block lists, according to the report.

(www.theregister.co.uk 05OCT07)

Last Modified: Saturday, 27-Oct-2007 19:05:06 EDT