Russian Spam on YouTube
- Wednesday, October 21, 2009, 8:24
- Threat Research
We had earlier blogged about spammers abusing different social networking websites and taking full advantage to host their spam on them. Recently researchers at McAfee Labs came across a new spam campaign in which yet another big social networking website, YouTube, is being abused.
As we know, YouTube is a video sharing website on which users can upload and share videos. During a recent spam campaign, we saw that Russian spammers had created a spam video and are hosting it on YouTube. This new spam trend, hosting spam videos, could possibly alarm other regional spammers and as a result we may see spam videos in other languages including English, Chinese, and German, etc.
Some of the subjects lines read as:-
Subject: ВАША РЕКЛАМА МОЖEТ БЫТЬ ЗДЕСЬ
Subject: Служба e-mail раccылок
Translated to English:-
Subject: Your advertisement can be here
Subject: Service for e-mail distribution
The mail body is short, with a link to YouTube. Users who might have clicked on the URL would have watched a small video of approximately 36 seconds in which two guys converse in Russian, At the end of the video the spammer inserts information like telephone and ICQ numbers to reach them.
Translated to English:-
Widespread distribution – http://www.youtube.com/watch?Text has been removed
The text on the video was somewhat like this:
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