Test Center: Michael Jackson's Death And The Spam Explosion

E-mail spam is in the spotlight again. An explosion of spam, following the deaths of Michael Jackson and other iconic celebrities, is being reported across the Web.

In the Test Center, our honeypot threat network is also logging spam in the past couple of days at rates never seen since the deployment of the threat network more than a year ago.

The content of the spam e-mail is not being tracked, so we cannot ascertain if the content of the messages has any mention of Jackson or any other celebrity, for that matter.

However, in the last week and a half the threat network is logging unprecedented amounts of spam forwarding attempts via SMTP from domains never tracked before.

Doing a Web search on the vast majority of these domains pulls up sites used to phish for a user's e-mail address. These sites appear to be spam unsubscribe listings; however, they are most likely ways to pass off users' e-mail addresses to more spammers.

Some of these domains are already on security vendors' lists as known spammers and are on blacklist databases. A few of them are not. Some of the undocumented perpetrators include:

brrb. testawaitingtheyre.com

term.expertrepulse.com

floor.intra-dayauction.com

yumi.moonroe.net

opensource.chickensstifle.com

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