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November 02, 2009

Here's another guy who, depending on his business relationship with the final destination web site, could make a bundle by simply spamming the notion of a party:

Subject: Party reminder

Hello dannyg,

Party reminder
http://www.[removed].cn/

Best regards,

Tatum Hikel
2009-11-02

If you put this message into the mailbox of every single-ish Gen-[late letter of the alphabet]er, how many would follow the link? I'll bet it's a pretty high percentage, despite the Chinese domain name. And how many of those responders have ever heard of Tatum Hikel? Zero percent.

I can't tell you for sure what's at the end of the link — whether it's selling medz/warez/knockoffz or performing a drive-by malware download — because the spamvertized site uses a server redirect to the actual destination. I chose not to follow the redirect (I don't use a typical browser for these initial investigations) because it's possible that the spamvertized web site pays for referrals: Let some poor schlub take the risk and expense of spamming, while the seller pays a pittance for every visitor whose referring web site (automatically tracked by almost every web server) belongs to the schlub. I simply don't want the spammer to gain the tiniest fraction of a yuan from my curiosity.

Unfortunately, such will not be the case of all those whose main mission in life is to party hearty.