Spam, campaign statistics and red flag URLs

It’s not often spammers send me their campaign statistics, but on Tuesday one did.
The spam came “from” news@udemy.com, used udemy.com in the HELO and message-ids and, sure enough, was advertising udemy.com:
 

Received: from udemy.com (unknown [198.20.115.217]) by ...
From: Udemy <news@udemy.com>
Subject: The Photoshop Secret - Master Adobe Photoshop like a Pro!
Message-ID: <20160706031012.1E35F28A6B081174@udemy.com>

 
But the call to action link was a bit.ly URL. Following the clickthroughs, the bit.ly URL redirected to linksynergy.com, which in turn redirected to udemy.com. Nothing too surprising – udemy.com’s users are paying udemy for clicks, which udemy are buying from linksynergy and linksynergy are buying from our spammer. A perfectly normal, spammer-infested affiliate programme.
The spammer might be using bitly to hide the linksynergy URL (linksynergy links on web pages might well be legitimate, but in email they’re a serious red flag and an almost sure sign that the mail is spam), but I think it more likely they’re using it for bitly’s click-through reporting.
One of the nice things about bitly clickthrough reporting is that anyone can see it, just by adding a + sign to the end of it. Our spammer sent https://bitly.com/1JUHIe3, so if we go to https://bitly.com/1JUHIe3+ we can see everything about the clicks on it.
It’s had 56,622 clickthroughs since early February. The vast majority of clicks had no referers, so were likely from email. Of the few hundred that did have referers, they mostly look like webmail. So it’s pretty likely this URL has been used solely for spam.
Bitly__The_power_of_the_link_
 
This same URL has been used in four spam campaigns so far, mostly targeted to North America.
Bitly__The_power_of_the_link_
Bitly__The_power_of_the_link_
From a spam perspective one of the interesting things is that this URL has been in active use in spam for at least six months, without any of Udemy, LinkSynergy (aka Rakuten) or bit.ly taking any action against it. It’s possible that’s just because none of them knew about it, I guess.
If I’m filtering email this tells me that bitly (or clicksynergy or linkshare) URLs in email are likely to be a problem – and, hence, if I’m sending legitimate email I should avoid using any of that sort of URL in my email. Something we’ve discussed here before.
And if I’m considering running an affiliate programme this is a good example of why I either have to run a very good, well-policed affiliate programme or make a business decision that I’ll make more money from paying spammers to bring in leads than I’ll lose customers due to my poor reputation.

Related Posts

Bad data drives delivery problems

It’s a wild election season here in the US. In the past few presidential elections, email has played a bigger and bigger role in messaging and fundraising. President Obama’s campaign used email effectively, but sent  huge volumes. In fact, the volume was so heavy, it led to a joke on the Daily Show.

Read More

Sanford Wallace goes to Jail

Sanford Wallace has been sentenced to 2 years in jail by the US District court in San Jose for contempt of court and electronic mail fraud. Sanford has been around for more than 2 decades. He is one of the spammers that drove me to learn how to read headers and report spam back in the late nineties.
White Collar Crime.
Sanford has been in and out of courts and the news almost as long as he’s been spamming. When I dug into Pacer this morning to grab a copy of the sentencing report I see multiple cases, some going back as far as 1996. There aren’t electronic records for Concentric Network v. Wallace, et al. (case: 5:96-cv-20829-RMW) but the final disposition of the case says “Permanent Injunction.”

Read More

Memories of Spam in May

This morning on Facebook a friend posted a picture saying that 15 years ago was the very first anti-spam conference (Spamcon*). All we have are some blurry scans of pictures and coffee mugs.
13322193_10209611310107693_488418243076278791_n.
That 550 sign belonged to the bar where the night out was held. It got bought by K & P and lived in their garden until it rotted away a few years ago. So many folks who are still active in the space, and so many folks who’ve moved on. Names I’d forgotten, faces I haven’t.
Many of those folks are still working in email. Some on the sending side, some on the tools and vendor side, some on the ISP side, some on the consulting side.  That conference was one of the very first times people publicly gathered to talk about spam. There were other occasions, but most were invite only with hand picked representatives of specific companies.
At that first Spamcon I was freshly laid off from MAPS (now Trend Micro). I was considering what next. The thing is, I really liked the work I was doing. MAPS had me leading a team to provide abuse desk as an outsourced service. We had a very large network provider as a customer and we were handling all the mail that came into abuse@ there. It was a challenge, I was creating processes and documenting policy, trying to do more with less and managing my first team ever.
Much of what I do now, here, grew out of that position. It was clear even then there was a need for someone who could help navigate the challenges of email.
In the same thread another person posted pictures from a social night in DC during the FTC Spam Forum. More folks, some I have lost touch with and some who are still friends and colleagues.
We were so young. All of us.
This is yet another form of community that email created. Some of it was built over email, but a lot of it happened on USENET and IRC and local meetups. There were so many ways we built community using plain text and dialup. The technology has changed, and that community from a dozen years ago has changed but it’s still all the same deep down inside.
SpamconMugs
 
(* If, at any point, you see me type Spamconk instead of Spamcon please blame autocorrect. It’s being difficult and even tries to correct it when I go back and edit sentences.)

Read More