Summer of Spam – Less Image, More PDF Spam

Phishing

The summer of spam continues with an influx of PDF spam coming into users’ inboxes. According to Symantec’s “July State of Spam” report, image spam continues its decline, and replacing it is spam with a new flavor of attachments, including PDFs with “word salad” or nonsense words strung together to fool email and spam filters.

“When opened, the PDF file is an ad or some other spam message. The PDF attachments result in messages that are very large in size. We have been monitoring this throughout the past month, but it has really heated up in the past week. So far, we have observed over 25 million messages that were categorized as PDF spam,” said Symantec researchers in the report.

The Symantec researchers said they also have seen a few different variants of this type of spam type.

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