Ads for shady Internet pharmacies are partly responsible for a new spike in spam levels. The spam messages deliver the ads buried in image attachments and most of them hawk Viagra and other similar medications. The subject lines are random and not related to the contents of the messages but they all attempt to direct recipients into clicking on links that lead to various pharmacy websites-some of which could be fake ones. Such malicious sites look legit and offer a shopping cart and accept credit cards, but unlike legit sites, the orders are never sent.

The other type of spam uses a new technique-blank messages. Spammers are sending messages with no subject line or body with the sole purpose of finding out what addresses are valid, usually within specific domains and presumably to harvest those addresses for future spam and/or phishing attacks.

Additionally, malicious spam masquerading as delivery failure notices from Western Union continues to flood the net. This type of spam informs the recipient that a Western Union money transfer could not be completed and directs them to open the included attachment, print out the receipt and bring it to their local Western Union office to get the money back. The scammers are hoping to find a few greedy souls who think they’ve gotten a chance to receive some free money. The attachment actually contains a nasty Trojan.

It’s important to keep all anti-virus products up to date and make sure you have an effective spam filter installed on your network, and as always make sure your employees know to never click on links or open attachments in emails from people they don’t know.