Archive notice: This article was originally published on October 24, 2007. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
The MP3 spam registered by the company’s experts consists of
e-mails whose aim is to advertise the stock of a particular company and
increase the stock price. Stock spam appeared for the first time in August
last year. Since then, the senders of these messages have proved
particularly innovative when it came to circumventing anti-spam measures. Thus, the messages were sent in distorted graphics files and PDF files
that were not recognized by spam filters when they first appeared.
However, the e-mails discovered by Kaspersky Lab contain no text, but instead an
MP3 file with a duration of 25 to 33 seconds. In it, a distorted
female voice advertises the shares of Exit Only Inc. In this way, spammers
usually try to drive up the price of shares in order then to be able to sell them at a
profit.
The current mass mailing is probably a kind of trial run for the spammers, which
cannot exactly be described as successful because of some technical limitations. To keep the file size low, the senders were forced to use audio-
recordings of very poor quality. The result: the message is barely understandable even at high volume, Moreover, the senders altered the recording slightly in every e-mail in order to circumvent spam filters, which further degraded the
quality.
The appearance of MP3 spam had been expected by experts for some time.
However, because of the technical limitations mentioned, Kaspersky Lab
assumes that this form of unwanted advertising will not prevail.
„The poor sound quality will cause users not to listen to these messages,“ explains Andrey Nikishkin, Director Hosted Security Services Business
Unit„We think that MP3 spam mailings will recur from time to time, but will have no
significant influence on spam statistics.“
