According to security experts, a sharp rise in child porn spam is expected soon. Security firm Sophos has observed an increase in the amount of illegal child-porn websites over the past week by a factor of three, and accompanying this is an aggressive spam campaign.
Most of the email samples clearly suggest that the content will be offensive with explicit subject lines. The email message invites the recipient to click on a link to view illegal material.
To get through email filters that might look for specific text patterns, the author of these spam messages appears to have used extracts from a quotation database, selected at random. Other tricks used to slip through the spam traps include using asterisks between letters in the email subject headings.
Sophos say that they have been passing details of the illegal and offensive material on to the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF). This is the organisation charged with combating illegal internet content.