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16 Nov 2005

Spammers urge recipients to decrease their organs

"Give spammers the cold shoulder," says Sophos

SophosLabsâ„¢, 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 complete security solutions that are simple to deploy, manage, and use and that deliver the industry's lowest total cost of ownership. Sophos offers award-winning encryption, endpoint security, web, email, mobile and network security solutions backed by SophosLabs - a global network of threat intelligence centers.

Sophos is headquartered in Boston, US and Oxford, UK. More information is available at www.sophos.com.