Today's Security Fix

Spam spoofs e-mail client

Summer appears to be the time of year when spammers get creative.

Over the past two months spammers have attempted to swindle e-mail users with honest spam, Swine Flu spam, and even romantic spam.

And summer’s not over yet.

Last week saw the emergence of spam that looks to users to be from the maker of their e-mail client. According to an August 19 post on one of Symantec’s security blogs, spammers are sending out messages that look like they come from popular e-mail programs, such as Microsoft’s Outlook. The message tells the user they must reconfigure their messaging client by clicking on the link embedded in the e-mail (Oh, if reconfiguring your e-mail client were only so easy!)

Instead the unsuspecting user who follows the link is sent to a malicious Web site where they think they’re downloading a new version of the messaging software, but malware is downloaded instead, which could lead to the theft of personal or financial information.

Now, if the spam recipient doesn’t use Outlook, that may be a dead giveaway that the e-mail is bogus. But the creator of these messages is going to some effort to make the e-mail appear legitimate, such as including a phone number to call should the user need assistance.

We’ve all gotten those ‘Welcome’ messages from our e-mail client in our in-box, so why wouldn’t we believe a message from the same source saying telling us to reconfigure our software?

Score one for the spammers.

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