PDF’s of course being preferred by spammers as you don’t need to extract anything to view their spam, you just open it in your favourite PDF viewer and read all about viagra and cialis!

Of course there was some nasty exploits in PDF recently aswell with some other XSS issues associated.

Anyway the point is GFI has recently released a new white paper exploring PDF spam, which describes how spammers have changed their spamming tactics over the years and how the common PDF file format has been adopted to send image spam.

This white paper explains what makes spam such an unbearable problem and how spamming tactics are evolving daily to beat anti-spam software. In the space of two months, spammers have switched from image spam to using PDF, Excel and ZIP file attachments. By using these attachments to send images instead of embedding them in the body of the email message, spammers have taken the cat-and-mouse game with anti-spam software developers to a new level.

It’s quite an interesting read.

The white paper is freely available for download here:

Attachment spam – The latest trend [PDF]

No registration is required to access this white paper.

If you have any questions about this subject, GFI has said we can ask them anything we want about this subject – so we can basically conduct an interview online about image/pdf/attachment spam and spam fighting measures in general.

So, if you have any questions just leave them in the comments, or if you feel they are too long – use the Contact Darknet form.

Thanks!