PDF SPAM!

Has anyone else been receiving SPAM emails latest that contain PDF attachments? I've received about 10 of these in the part week and am not sure of the purpose of them. AFAIK PDFs cannot contain any malicious code, so what is their point?

Same here.

I believe PDF spam can be used to circumvent most conventional spam filters, which is the main reason they're doing it. Also, I believe there was an exploit a while back that made it possible to execute malicious code through Acrobat documents and older versions of IE/Firefox. Sometimes I wonder how these kids manage to find the exploits ... if they spent their time doing something at school instead, the world would be a much better place.

Same for spammers, of course. No one reads spam, and I'd be surprised if they ever even got one sale out of their product adverts. SO WHY DO IT?

Yep, recieved plenty and it seems neither GMail nor Mozilla Thunderbird spam filters are catching them at present. Nothing we can do I guess except flag them as spam and hope the filters learn quickly.

Don't think I've had any recently, but if they got caught by my spam fiter, I won;t have seen them.

Nope, I rarely get any in my inbox, always in the junk folders

I tend to get more SPAM than most due to my main email address being directly linked from the contact page on the main site. Even with SPAM filters at the server end, and running locally, some does still get through. You may think this means the filters are not working or setup correctly, but that is far from the case. The server catches around 1000 SPAM emails sent to my main account every day! And the local one catches about 40 more a day that get past the server. This does leave me with just these new PDF SPAMs sometimes getting past both and ending up in my inbox. Probably one a day at the moment.

I never got any here at work, I get no spam at all at work. I get a lot of spam at home, because I have nothing set up to block them in Outlook Express. And I delete them immediately every time, so I don't know if they also send me PDF spam.

Now it's Excel .xls files that they're sending. These potentially could contain malicous code and again neither the GMail nor Thunderbird filters are picking up 100% of them yet. :mad:

Only use a local filter.
Haven't configured it much.
The pdf spams seem to be on the increaee.

Yep! I'm also now getting a few Excel .xls attachments in spam emails arriving in my inbox. I've started teaching the spam filter to catch them and it is already started to spot most of them.

As you say, Excel files are just as dangerous as Word .doc documents if you try to open them as they can contain full VB scripts embedded in them designed to do anything.

getting 5-10 a day or so, on the norm. Used to use a whitelist, but yet to set that up since reformatting.

Thinks me must go back and do it now! :yesyes:

I still don't get the point of SPAM. Is it purely used so the SPAMMERS can log working email accounts to sell on as emailing lists to others?

If so, I just cannot see how that works as most SPAM I see when I check the caught spam directory on my server is just plain text with no links or images for the sender to verify the email actually arrived. Unless they just take it that all emails that they don't get an error bounce back for must be working and in use.

I have 3 main accounts on my server all 3 recieve 20 to 30 of these daily, :(. Does my head in. I just open thunderbird, and click delete, delete, delete, ;)

My SPAM filters work pretty well so I don't normally need to delete much from my inbox. But it is still very annoying seeing them all when i check my SPAM directory on the server to make sure it hasn't accidentally caught something it shouldn't have.

On average I get at least 2,000 SPAMs sent to my main email account each month, plus there are always about another 10,000 in the catchall classicamiga inbox.