16 Nov 2005
Spammers urge recipients to decrease their organs
"Give spammers the cold shoulder," says Sophos
SophosLabs™, Sophos's global
network of virus and spam analysis centers, has recently spotted
spam with a novel take on "bodily organs". Rather than offering to
increase the size of one or more parts of your body, they are now
offering to buy bits of it off you.
A typical example follows:
Subject:** Sell your organs online!
Message body: Please reply to this email if you want to
make some cash selling your organs!
"In this case computer users should have little difficulty in
following the adage of 'don't try, don't buy, don't reply'," says
Paul Ducklin,
Sophos's Head of Technology, Asia Pacific. "This sort of spam
should focus the mind on how the spam economy works. A handful of
responses - one or two, even - would represent success to the
spammers, because their operating costs are borne by you and me. So
give them the cold shoulder, if you will pardon the pun."
Sophos recommends companies protect themselves with a consolidated solution which can defend businesses
from the threats of both spam and viruses.
About Sophos
More than 100 million users in 150 countries rely on Sophos as the best protection against complex threats and data loss. Sophos is committed to providing security and data protection solutions that are simple to manage, deploy and use and that deliver the industry's lowest total cost of ownership. Sophos offers award-winning encryption, endpoint security, web, email, and network access control solutions backed by SophosLabs - a global network of threat intelligence centers. With more than two decades of experience, Sophos is regarded as a leader in security and data protection by top analyst firms and has received many industry awards.
Sophos is headquartered in Boston, US and Oxford, UK. More information is available at www.sophos.com.