A US presidential candidate called Ron Paul has been advertised in spam. There’s currently a massive shitstorm raging about the true source of the spam — it was delivered via an infected consumer broadband machine, so the source is of course untraceable from the email alone.
Of course, being spam, I received a copy ;) Here’s a spample, if you’re curious.
The unusual “Content-Type” header format (matching the STOX_REPLY_TYPE SpamAssassin rule) has been seen in a lot of pump-and-dump stock spam recently. (It’s also shown up in Storm output, but this isn’t from Storm.) It’s been around for at least 6 months, so it’s probably a built-in behaviour of a downloaded spamware app, rather than a frequently-updated web-hosted spamware site.
My guess — I’d say the spam was sent using the same spamware application that one of the larger, recent pump-and-dump spammers has been using — so a reasonably sophisticated app, and not just an ancient copy of DarkMailer or whatever.
It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out…