Recently I’ve been getting spam email with PDF attachments. I already got three since yesterday.

The email comes with random sender email addresses, no message body, and subjects containing the file name of the PDF attachment. The PDF attachment invariably contains garbage about certain stocks.

McAfee believes this is a logical evolution from those image spams of yesterday (I’m sure you got some of those). From the McAfee Avert Labs Blog:

A large “pump-and-dump” stock spam campaign is underway, but rather than including the content of the spam in an image file, this campaign includes the spam content within a .PDF file. The stock spam is believed to be sent from Stration infected computers, as this spam campaign closely followed a new W32/Stration worm mass-mailing which contained a number of .PDF files, and Stration has been associated with pump and dump spam in the past.

The attachment is not malware. The email is a nuisance, though.