YouTube used for video spam

Kaspersky Lab’s Content Filtering Research group recorded a mass mailing that contained a link directing users to a video advert on YouTube. The mass mailing contained a number of variations of the message but every single one came with the same YouTube link.

“Naturally, this type of advertising is more interesting and gets more hits,” says Darya Gudkova, Head of Content Analysis & Research at Kaspersky Lab. “Two years ago spammers used the YouTube name and the promise of interesting videos to lure users to advertising sites. Now the links really do lead to this popular video hosting site which is being used to store unsolicited advertising content.”

This is not the first time a creative approach has been used by spammers this year. In April, messages were detected that contained nonstandard, complex images advertising spammer services. Noise techniques have also been applied to graphical files, causing problems for spam filters.