Pump and Dump spam is changing - PDFs and now Excel Spreadsheets

Those of us who run e-mail services have been beating our systems up doing Optical Character Recognition on image files to figure out if they are spam - and now we're seeing the spammers shift to PDF (Portable Document Format - popularized by Adobe) to push their schemes. I've received several thousand of these PDFs over the past few weeks to the various accounts I monitor.

Now I'm seeing reports of the spammers sending out Excel spreadsheets with the message embedded in them.

Of course none of you would open any file you received from someone that you were not expecting one from, would you!!!!

Even though neither the PDF nor the Excel files currently contain any other payload than the stock message, it is more than possible that this will change and we'll see those opening (and reacting to) the message losing money, they'll also end up infecting their computer and becoming part of the millions of 'bot computers "out there" that are the problem in the first place; compromised systems.

See SANS article: http://isc.sans.org/diary.php?storyid=3177

So the message is - - - Don't open any attachments that you are not expecting!!! No Exceptions!!!

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Firefox has issued a security update to version 2.0.0.5 to eliminate a security hole that could trigger a problem if you use both Firefox and IE at the same time, as well as a few other minor things. See SANS article for details: http://isc.sans.org/diary.php?storyid=3121

Note that Firefox 1.5 is no longer supported at all - so update if you have not done so yet.