Spammers have outsmarted Youtube and are using the “Invite Your Friends” system to send out “massive quantities of spam,” according to content security firm Marshall.

The security firm has warned email users to be cautious of messages coming from service@youtube.com as these have the same appearance as a legitimate YouTube “Invite Your Friends” messages except these mails are full of spam content with links to third-party sites.

Bradley Anstis, Marshal’s director of product management, in a post on company’s web site, said that “YouTube users have a facility where they can invite their friends to view videos that they are looking at or have posted. This effectively allows them to email to any address from their YouTube account. This is the functionality that the spammers are exploiting.”

This type of attack is not complicated to execute which is why it could become a major security concern.

“Spammers are doing this to defeat spam filters and to lower the recipient’s guard by making it look as though the messages are coming from a perfectly innocuous email address. YouTube’s own Help Center suggests that you exclude the service@youtube.com email address from spam filtering. The spammers are keenly aware of this.”

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Entry was posted on Saturday, October 6th, 2007 at 2:57 am under Security, Technology, YouTube.

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