Spamhuntress

I got a phishing mail today that looked pretty believable, until I hovered the mouse pointer over the link they wanted me to go to:

h*tp://www.adwords.google.com.sessionops.cn/select/Login

I think they goofed on one thing though, it’s Adsense that pays people, and with Adwords we’re supposed to pay them!

Here’s the fake Adwords mail:

From:    “Google AdWords-noreply”
To:   
Subject:    Please Re-activate your account.
Date sent:    Sat, 24 May 2008 18:52:46 +0100

>>>———————————————————————————————–

Dear Google AdWords Customer,

We were unable to process your payment.
Your ads will be suspended soon unless we can process your payment.
To prevent your ads from being suspended, please update your payment information.

Please sign in
to your account at http://adwords.google.com/select/login,
and update your payment information.

>>>————————————————————————————-
This message was sent from a notification-only email address that does
not accept incoming email. Please do not reply to this message.
>>>————————————————————————————-

2008 Google Adwords

I was searching Google Groups for a particular domain (sorry, can’t mention it here).

I was looking for hits in Usenet’s news.admin.net-abuse hierarchy. I did find two examples of spam e-mails.

But what I found next is what surprised me.

Apparently some spammer had at some time posted porn in the forum of this site, and then included that link in lots of spammy porn posts. Either that, or it’s just included as undisputedly “good” content.

But the kicker was where this was posted:

Letter soup groups on Google Groups. These groups were created with one goal: To serve as places to post spam. Let me give you an example:

http://groups.google.com/group/zdhwaaqb/about?hl=en

That’s the about page for the group. Notice there’s just ONE member? And only members can post? No discussions, only pages.