Mothers Day Spam campaign on the rise (May 9, 2013)

May 12 marks the celebration of Mother’s Day for 2013. As observed with most festivals, spammers are taking advantage of Mother’s Day as a guise to spread Spam. The chart below shows our observations for Mother’s Day related Spam over the last 10 days:

As clearly visible, we can see a steady rise in Mother’s Day related spam as May 12 approaches. We can expect the numbers to go down after May 12.

The following are subjects for a few emails that were observed in high numbers over this time period:

• Subject: $19.99 Flowers – Don’t Forget Mother’s Day!
• Subject: Make Mother’s Day unforgettable with fragrant flowers for $19.99!
• Subject: Special Mother’s Day Offer
• Subject: Wow, $19.99! That’s right, beautiful Mother’s Day bouquets for $19.99.
• Subject: Don’t Forget Mother’s Day – $19.99 Flowers

Flowers are considered as one of the most recommended gifts for Mother’s Day, thus it is not surprising to see this as a very common subject in most of the Spam Emails. The following are screenshots for some of the Spam Emails that we saw:

Some of the websites to which the users are redirected to as part of these campaigns may be legitimate, but most of the websites are designed to extract personal information from the user without providing the services to which the user pays for. Some emails redirect the users to completely unrelated websites, for instance all the links in the email below redirect the user to a website that shows popular search results. There is high possibility that links in some emails would redirect the users to malicious websites.

Additionally we observed a many of the links that were involved in Spam emails to use .pw domain extension. Recent findings have pointed to a sudden surge in Spam campaigns involving .pw domains. The same can be seen in this case. Few such links that we observed during our analysis appear to have been created very recently, this gives an indication that they may have been created with Mother’s Day Spam campaign in mind.

We urge our readers to be very careful of such emails and please refrain from providing sensitive personal information to websites that you do not trust.

Dell SonicWALL Gateway AntiVirus monitors and provides constant protection against malicious threats. We wish our readers a Happy Mother’s Day.

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