Move over, herbal Viagra and Nigerian wire transfers. MP3 "stock tip" files are the new spam du jour.
The mass mailing of MP3 audio files embedded with questionable stock tips are the latest way spammers are trying to get their unsolicited e-mails to your inboxes, according to security researchers Kaspersky Lab and Commtouch.
Spammers are sending bulk e-mails with MP3 attachments. Users who open the audio files will hear a distorted female voice advising listeners to invest in a certain stock. The intent is to inflate stock prices so spammers can make a profit on the subsequent sales of certain stocks.
Specifically, the messages themselves are much larger than "traditional" spam, averaging 85 Kbytes, but have reached up to 147 KB, Commtouch said.
Most of the subject lines are empty, containing just "Fwd:" or "Re:", or the name of the file attachment. File names include both popular music (santana.mp3, sayyousayme.mp3, smashingpumpkins.mp3) as well as other "cool" sound files, such as coolringtone.mp3, listentothis.mp3.
The messages have been able to bypass traditional spam filters due to specially crafted graphics files that contain background noise as well as attaching .pdf files that move undetected by the filters, according to Kaspersky.
Though Kaspersky expects occurrences of MP3 spam to increase, they are doubtful it will have any great economic impact. To keep attachment sizes small, for example, spammers have to use very low-quality recordings, making it difficult to hear the message and thereby defeating the purpose. Most recipients are also not likely to open the attachments, rendering them even more useless, Kaspersky said.
"Users often send each other short audio files with funny recordings - it seems as though spammers are banking on the fact that users think these files worth listening to," Andrey Nikishin, director of Kaspersky Lab's IT security outsourcing operation, said in a statement. "A user gets an MP3 file and thinks it's going to be something funny or interesting, so they'll open it. But the spammers are limited in the size of recording they can send, which is why the quality of the recording is very bad. We probably will see more MP3 mass mailings, but they won't have any real effect on our spam statistics."
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The Hot New Spam Type: MP3s
whats next? Video Spam? 
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