Swine Flu Spam Soon Infecting A Mailbox Near You

Security vendor McAfee on its Avert Labs blog Monday said spam messages hawking medicine for swine flu are already making the rounds. It's a trend that will only grow as spammers try to draw unsuspecting users to fake pharmaceutical sites. "I do expect Oseltamivir [a.k.a. Tamiflu] will get some extra exposure once the affiliate pill sites are updated," said Chris Barton, research scientist, on the blog.

McAfee has also seen a significant increase ("up by about 30 times") in domain name registrations that include the word "swine," Barton said.

Cisco Systems' IronPort Tuesday said swine flu spam accounts for about 4 percent of global spam. Both McAfee and IronPort have seen celebrities such as Madonna and Salma Hayek thrown into the swine flu spam mix.

Sample subject lines IronPort has seen include:

- Swine flu worldwide
- Swine flu in the USA
- Swine flu in Hollywood
- Salma Hayek caught swine flu
- Madonna caught swine flu

What can channel partners take from all this? For security VARs, it's a great time to talk to customers about spam filters.