Wired: ‘Apple’s iMessage Is Being Taken Over by Spammers’

Robert McMillan, reporting for Wired:

A year ago, Tom Landesman — who works for security and anti-spam company Cloudmark — had never seen an iMessage spam. But he and his company now say that, thanks to one particularly aggressive campaign from a junk mailer, it accounts for more than 30 percent of all mobile spam messages.

These kinds of spam campaigns come and go. Cloudmark spotted its first one late last year, when the scammers were flogging imitation designer handbags. Lately, the spammers have been pushing deals on knock-off Ray-Ban and Oakley sunglasses. […]

“It’s almost like a spammer’s dream,” says Landesman. “With four lines of code, using Apple scripts, you can tell your Mac machine to send message to whoever they want.”

I think the headline is hyperbole, but I have gotten two iMessage spams this month, both of them hawking those knock-off Ray-Bans. I just went ahead and reported them to Apple.

★ Thursday, 21 August 2014