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Feature Article

MP3 Spam has Arrived

By Ben Gross
in

GFI SecurityLabs issued a note today about a new type of pump and dump spam with MP3 attachments. The voice appears to be generated using text to speech.

GFI has a sample of the audio on it’s web site as does a note about MP3 spam from SophosLabs. I found several examples in my own spam collection, the first of which appeared yesterday. Each appear to be variants of the same scam distorted in slightly different ways. This is akin to modifications made to image spam where each images are distorted so that each is unique. It would be interesting to know which vendor’s voice synthesis engine is used. Also, if the audio distortions are generated on the fly as they are with image spam or added after the fact to an original audio file.

Unfortunately, I suspect that we can look forward to more of this type of spam in the future. Movie attachment spam is a most certainly next.

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Published October 18, 2007

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