Sunday, June 30, 2013

Role Of Redirects In Spam

Spam is not a new problem for email user. Security company Kaspersky have written an analysis about redirects in spam.

Spammers frequently use redirects in their emails: after clicking on a link in a spam message, the recipient is often taken through a series of websites before reaching the destination resource.

There are many reasons for using redirects. In most cases, they help spammers to hide the data that enables spam filters to classify a message as unwanted – e.g., the website or contact phone number of the spammers’ customer. As a result, the recipient (as well as the spam filter) sees no links to the website being advertised in the message, no telephone numbers or email addresses that can be used to contact those who ordered the spam mailing. The message only contains a link to an intermediary resource. In addition, if the spammer is a member of an affiliate program, he will need to know how many users followed the link, because his income directly depends on that. As a result the chain of websites through which a user is sent may include redirector sites which function as counters.

The analysis can be read here.

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