Spammers celebrate Easter in advance (March 29, 2013)

Festivals bring an opportunity for the family to come together and celebrate,these celebrations often involve shopping for near and dear ones. Spammers take advantage of this and tailor their spam campaigns to mislead and infect innocent users.

Easter is a festival that is celebrated during the beginning of spring, this year it will be celebrated on 31st March. As the celebration day approaches, we are seeing an expected rise in Easter related spam mails. The following graph highlights our findings based on Easter related spam observed over the last 10 days.

As clearly visible, we can see a sharp rise in Easter related spam over the last few days. This trend is expected to continue until 31st March, after which we can expect a slow decline in these numbers.

The following are few mails that were observed a lot during the last few days:

• Subject: $19.99 Flowers for Easter + FREE Vase
• Subject: FREE Easter Egg Hunt Saturday March 30th
• Subject: What better way to celebrate Easter than with flowers – Shop now
• Subject: Get Easter Baskets and Other gifts for your child. Personalized too!
• Subject: Easter Order deadline
• Subject: Letter From The Easter Bunny
• Subject: Easter Special- Huge Savings on all Makes and Models
• Subject: Easter Blowout Sale on all Vehicles
• Subject: Easter Sunday Shocker: Take 10lbs off your body
• Subject: Easter Blowout Sale on all Vehicles
• Subject: 50% off stunning Easter blooms!
• Subject: Save 50% off the best bouquets for Easter

The following are screenshots for some of the spam:

Most of these spams try to entice the user into paying money and/or sharing sensitive personal information for a service or commodity. It is highly unlikely that the user will actually get these promised services/products. We urge our readers to be careful regarding such spam campaigns during Easter.

Dell SonicWALL Gateway AntiVirus monitors and provides constant protection against malicious threats. Wishing our readers a happy Easter!

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