Personalized spam preys on your curiosity

By Mathew Nisbet, Malware Data Analyst at MessageLabs | Aug 13, 2010

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Spammers use many tactics to add legitimacy to their emails. One technique used is the personalization of their spam, where the spammer will add text to the email that specifically mentions the recipient, a technique often used in legitimate marketing campaigns.

A legitimate marketing email from a well known company will usually include the recipient’s name. In this case the marketer will likely have access to the users’ personal information because the user has signed up to receive their newsletter or is a previous customer.

For a spammer, obtaining personal information is not so simple. An easy way for them to get a similar effect though, is to simply use the email address to which they are sending.

While this is not a name, it can have the same effect by making the email appear it was sent in accordance with a legitimate mailing list, rather than spamming at random. This can be a fairly effective tactic as a lot of websites now use email addresses as usernames.

The body of these spam emails is typically very short. In all the samples MessageLabs Intelligence analyzed, the body appeared as a single line, which was the URL the spammer wanted the recipient to visit. This is fairly common in spam, because the spammer wants to get the recipient to the website as soon as possible.

The longer the recipient spends looking at a spam email, the more likely they are to realize it is a scam, or just close the email because it took too long to read. The goal is to make the user curious enough about what is being offered to click the link.

In this particular example, the spammer has also "personalized" the url. This has the double effect of giving just one extra bit of legitimacy to the scam as a whole, but also allows the spammer to track which users are responding. These emails all link to the same "online pharmacy" website, as shown below.

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