YouTube video spam promotes Russian real estate
A different kind of viral video
Posted in Spam, 9th October 2009 16:34 GMT
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Russian security researchers have discovered a spam campaign that points towards video ads hosted on YouTube.
Previous junk mail campaigns have featured links to supposed video clips that actually point directly towards malvertised sites. The latest campaign differs because it uses videos clips rather than empty promises of multimedia content.
Junk mail messages promote Russian-language clips touting industrial real estate services, according to Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab. The campaign, which targets Russian language speakers, has been ongoing since the start of October.
The spam messages feature varied body text in junk mail messages that include the same link to a video hosted by YouTube. Kaspersky said the approach is the first it has detected that's designed to make users view an advertising video via junk mail.
"This type of advertising is more interesting and gets more hits," said Darya Gudkova, head of content analysis and research at Kaspersky Lab. "Two years ago spammers used the YouTube name and the promise of interesting videos to lure users to advertising sites. Now the links really do lead to this popular video hosting site which is being used to store unsolicited advertising content." ®
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