Spam can deliver phishing links, malware, and fraudulent messages, making it a path for account theft and other cyberattacks.
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Background for this topic.
Spam is unsolicited, usually bulk messaging sent through email, text messages, social platforms, or other communication services. It may be commercial advertising, but security-relevant spam commonly includes deceptive messages designed to look like trusted communications. Automated campaigns can target large numbers of recipients at low cost, while compromised accounts and spoofed sender identities can make messages appear more credible.
Spam is a delivery channel for phishing, malware, fraudulent payment requests, and credential theft; links or attachments should therefore be treated as untrusted until verified. Defenses include reputation and content filtering, user reporting, attachment and URL analysis, and email authentication controls such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to reduce sender spoofing. Security teams should preserve relevant message headers and indicators when investigating campaigns, blocking associated infrastructure and checking whether recipients interacted with the content.
Bitdefender found that 77% of Black Friday-themed spam emails in 2024 have been identified as scams, with attackers becoming more creative in their campaigns
60% of QR code emails are spam according findings from Cisco Talos, who also identified attackers using QR code art to bypass security filters
Spotify playlists and podcasts are being abused to push pirated software, game cheat codes, spam links, and "warez" sites. By injecting targeted keywords and links in playlist names and podcast descriptions, threat actors may benefit from boosting SEO for their dubious online properties appearing in Google. [...]
Google appears to be readying a new feature called Shielded Email that allows users to create email aliases when signing up for online services and better combat spam