Eight is the magic number.

That’s how many PDF spam emails were waiting for me when I arrived at the office this morning.

So if you don’t believe the security vendors, believe me. PDF spam is spiking.

Unless, of course, those were legitimate proposals that I mistakenly deleted. In that case, I’d like to apologize to my friends Tobias C. Steele, Maximillian L. Reilly, Hugh O. Salas, Violet Clayton. Majory V. Gentry, Maude and Squad for trashing their emails.

Here’s what others had to say about recent jumps in PDF spam:

“We have received a number of reports from our readers indicating that they are receiving a large amount of pump-and-dump spam that contains no subject or body text. The emails do however contain attachments that have a .dat extension. Upon further review of the attachments, it appears that they are failed attempts at creating and sending a PDF file.

The attachments are the typical pharmacy scam spam. It is recommended that you just delete the emails. You may want to think about adding the .dat to your banned file extensions in your anti-virus programs at least until this round of spam has ended.”
- Deborah Hale, SANS Internet Storm Center, July 13, “Strange round of emails”

“Yes, PDF spams are now quite a common thing.

The easy way to recognize it is a big yellow square before the actual spam message…and the ‘Please Register this Version of PDFcrypt’ message…”
- Pedro Bueno, McAfee Avert Labs Blog, July 13, “New trend on PDF spam”