Analysis by: Mary Jen Sen Chua

The much-awaited 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup and the news on Sepp Blatters’ resignation spurred spam emails that can bypass antispam filters. The excerpts from the news are inserted in HTML codes of the said emails. These spam emails are able to bypass the filters by adding words and strings inside. Although, it doesn’t contain any malware, users are advised to be wary in opening emails from unknown sources.

Figure 1. Screenshot of the spam email with inserted news excerpts

Cybercriminals typically leverage upcoming sports events for social engineering techniques in order to proliferate their malicious activities. For more details on this, read our article, Cybercrime in Sports: Scoring Against Sports-themed Scams.

 SPAM BLOCKING DATE / TIME: June 16, 2015 GMT-8
 TMASE INFO
  • ENGINE:7.5
  • PATTERN:1618