CYREN’s GlobalView™ Security Lab (GSL) has detected a huge increase in spam over the last few days with the share of spam approaching 90% of all email traffic. In comparison the average spam share in January 2014 was 75%. After analyzing the traffic it became clear that one campaign was behind the increase. The subject lines include:
“BREAKING NEWS: Special Report”
“BREAKING NEWS: It’s hard to believe, but…”.
The emails promise easy extra income. The website “finance-reports.com” informs visitors that no money is needed, they can work from home, and there are no things to sell. As “proof”, the site shows a young mother with her baby and some paychecks.
The website layout is in a news style and the email uses a Fox News newsletter format. Every link in the email leads to finance-reports.com. The website imitates a serious finance portal and discussions about the offer are shown below the site in the comment section. If you try to leave the site a pop up window appears and asks: “Do you really want to leave the website?” Beyond this you will be redirected to another site called online survey jobs – which seems to focus on the same topic, but with a different layout/style.
Usually with sites like this users would have to pay a small purchase price (~$200) as the “real” last step after registration and then would be given access to “insider information”. These kinds of emails and sites are well known as scams (just do a search for “work at home scam”).