Spammers Using Amazon EC2 to Spread Spam
Spammers are now using Amazon’s Clod service EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud). Over last couple of days Sophos has detected a good amount of spam messages, telling users that your computer require a critical Microsoft Windows Update. This is oldest and best trick used by spammers to spread spam messages. There is no clear indication why spammers using Amazon EC2 to spread the spam messages but may be Amazon EC2 is well know and trustworthy site, users will be fooled into getting infected.
In order to stay protected, you should disregard any message with the following subject lines:
- Critical Microsoft Update
- Critical Update Notification
- Important Microsoft Update
- Important Update Notification
- Important Windows Update.
Basically, anything stating that you need some sort of critical update.
Spam message Screenshot taken from Sophos website
Alert message of Sophos Anti-virus
The emails arrived via an IP that is part of a botnet:
