String of targeted spam has us asking questions to ourselves and Symantec
As if I don’t bug my manager with enough questions, he’s been getting peppered in recent days with spam from mysterious gmail users asking about everything from whether the BlackBerry Storm has Wi-Fi to whether you have to dial 1 on a wireless phone.
We suspect targeted e-mail spam and asked Francis deSouza about them when the head of Symantec’s Enterprise Security Group paid us a visit this morning (more from deSouza on the latest from Symantec here).
While deSouza didn’t examine the messages, he concurred that they probably were some sort of targeted spam.
“This isn’t ‘Hey, let me target 10 million people with a Viagra ad.'” he said. “They just want you to respond. They want to know that they did a blast into a domain that they identified as belonging to an IT site, and once they know you’re real, they’ll customize it and customize it.”
And who knows, maybe it’s even the Mafia quizzing us about these tech topics. After all, organized crime was responsible for 90% of all data breaches in 2008, and spam and targeted emails are their favorite tools for getting in by far, deSouza says.
