MOUNTAIN VIEW, Ca. – McAfee has discovered the use of Google Docs by spammers that circumvent spam filters in order to deliver their unsolicited messages. Google Docs is Google’s online rival to Microsoft’s Word text processing application.
By hosting their message on legitimate sites such as Google Docs, spammers make it harder for anti-spam technology to block the messages. As a result, the junk mail can slide under the radar of many e-mail filters.
“[Google Docs spam] works against certain types of content filters,” said Dave Marcus, security research and communications manager with McAfee’s Avert Labs. “The link is not going to come up as a known spam link or a bad address because it’s a valid link. In that respect, it is a very clever way of getting past some types of content filters because nobody is going to block Google.”
In the Google Docs attack, spammers send a simple text e-mail that includes a link to a document hosted on the Google service. The Google document actually includes the spam message, for example advertising medications, stocks or other items.
The Google Docs spam is similar to image hosting spam, whereby spammers use legitimate image hosting services to serve up their message.
The volume of Google Docs spam isn’t very high. On a recent day, McAfee Avert Labs’ spam traps captured 517 spam e-mail messages that included links to Google Docs. Internet users should be aware that a link to any website, including Google Docs, could be malicious.
“Right now the ones we’ve seen haven’t pointed to other malware. It is the basic garden variety spam but using a clever vector,” said Marcus.
In order to not fall victim to this spam, Marcus advised people to be cautious of someone sending you Google documents that are unsolicited and be wary of subject lines trying to sell you something.
Marcus also noted that people should be aware that businesses aren’t going to do their document sharing through Google Docs, so it would be highly unlikely that a Google document sent would be for legitimate business use.
“It is [more of] a potential threat for consumers,” he said.
As well, Marcus said that there are some anti-spam filters that will stop Google Doc spam depending on who is sending it.
While it is a new threat, Marcus said that spammers will only use Google Docs for a small amount of spam runs and probably won’t abuse it for a long period of time because Google will then take some action and start looking at the content they are hosting and shut them down.
“In certain cases it going to be difficult for them to deal with because they will ultimately have to look at all the content that is being stored in Google Docs and that is going to be an awful lot of content. This might be a bit challenging, which is what the spammers are counting on a taking advantage of,” said Marcus.
He added that even though people should be cautious about opening Google documents because of the spam activity, they shouldn’t be scared away from using it.
This column was written by Vanessa Ho of ConnecIT
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