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It was only a week ago that I published a post called Malware Ecards: When Someone Cares Enough to Send Their Very Worst.  It appears that I may have to just start doing a weekly post focused on e-mail security because the spammers are hard at work again and probably clogging up your mailbox.

This time the payload isn't a program or link to a website; it's a Portable Document Format (PDF) attachment that can be opened if you have the Adobe Acrobat Reader program installed on your computer.  The PDF will most likely contain a few lines of text describing a company whose stock is extremely undervalued and encouraging the recipient to invest now because the stock is expected to quickly increase in value.

This type of scheme is known as "Pump and Dump" and Wikipedia provides a very good definition:

"Pump and dump" is form of microcap fraud that involves artificially inflating the price of a stock through false and misleading positive statements "pump", in order to sell the cheaply purchased stock at a higher price.  Once the scam artists "dump" their grossly overvalued shares, the price falls and investors lose their money.

While this type of scam is not new and you may have received similar e-mail messages in past years; the method of delivery (embedded in a PDF attachment) can make it difficult for filters to quarantine the unwanted e-mail.  While this type of spam is an annoyance, it can't do any real damage except for consuming space in your mailbox and the time required to delete it.

A safe rule is to treat e-mail from an unknown correspondent as hostile.  If you don't know the sender, you're probably better off deleting the message.