Nigerian Spammers – Now In Google Calendar
BitDefender(R), a provider of antivirus software and data security solutions, announced today that BitDefender antispam analysts have detected that Nigerian scam spammers are using Google Calendar to target their victims.
Nigerian scammers are sending meeting invites in Google Calendar, which are actually nothing but scam “hooks”. All emails are sent personally to different Google Calendar users and got a different link for each recipent, making spam/abuse URL filtering harder. The scam works by informing the victim that they have inherited or are otherwise due a large amount of money from an unlikely source. The spammer then tells the victim to extract the payment in order to “set up the delivery” of the said large sum. Google support has been notified to block the accounts used in the scam.
BitDefender CTO, Bogdan Dumitru, says this is a new and untried social engineering approach. The fact that these things are being spammed in huge numbers is a bit odd. Usually there is a testing phase, to evaluate the response rate. After some testing, some techniques are found ineffective and never get used again. This one’s different.
The new spam wave was detected two days ago by BitDefender antispam analysts and is already added to the spam signatures base. BitDefender users are guarded from this type of aggravation.
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