Spammers Use Spyware To Trick You Into Opening Spam

Scams

from the sneaky-sneaky dept

The war over spam keeps escalating, and it’s pretty obvious that the spammers have been winning in many cases. Once they figured out how to get Trojans onto computer, creating their own virtual spamming super computer, spammers have adopted this method for most of the spam they send out. However, they’re now adopting another net.annoyance to piss everyone off. They’re using spyware to get personal details about you that they can then use to get you to open their spam messages. In other words, they’re doing some keylogging, not necessarily to get your credit card and bank account info (not that they wouldn’t mind that info, of course), but to put the name of your children or your dog into the subject line, making it much more likely that you’ll open the spam message. Of course, it seems they didn’t consider the next step, which is that it also makes it much less likely that someone will actually buy. By tricking them into opening such a message, spammers will tend to both creep people out and piss them off. That’s usually not the best sales combination.