Gtron Solutions, LLC

New spam vectors that emerged in the first quarter of 2009 have the ability to customize the location for each user, making an embedded video spam more tempting to open.

This was recently discovered by Google’s  enterprise security and archiving security network (Postini) which processes and culls spam from more than three billion enterprise email connections every day.

Calling it ‘location-based spam’, Google said in its daily Enterprise Blog that this is the most significant development in spam vectors this quarter of 2009.

“It this type of attack, users click on a link in a spam message and are directed to a page that contains a fraudulent news headline describing a crisis or disaster in a major city nearby. .. the additiona of location creates a heightened level of interest and the user is tempted to click on the embedded video which in turn downloads a virus to his or her machine,” Google said.

Attackers dispatches customized spam based on the location of the user which they determine by peering through the user’s source IP and identifying the nearest major city.

In the same blog, Google revealed that the economy, financial markets, job cuts and resume help remain to be the most prominent topics employed by spammers to lure users.  They also noted the new found interest of spammers to read the news and keep their eyes on the holiday calendar to determine potential targets and customize their attacks.

Google also warned users of newly developed payload viruses which, according to their analysis, are spreading across every day of the week at random.

“Spammers have switched tactics [of spreading payload viruses at random] because they weren’t seeing the success they’d hoped for from the focused attacks,” Google stated in the blog.