Escalation of pharma spam from Gmail accounts

A recent noticeable upsurge of spam massages coming from compromised Gmail accounts has led the unfortunate victims to speculate that there is a bug in the Gmail mobile interface.

The base for this hypothesis can be found in the fact that the great majority of the victims noticed – by checking out the details of account activity that can be accessed by clicking on a “Details” link at the bottom of the Gmail page – that the hackers accessed the accounts through a mobile interface.

The recent news that the January attacks against Google have targeted its single sign-on system further fueled the speculations.

PC World reports that Google adamantly says that there is no Gmail bug that could have been exploited and offers an explanation for the mobile interface usage: “Spammers may sometimes use a mobile interface to access accounts they have already compromised because it’s simpler for bots to use this method at large scale.”

So far, it seems that the reason behind this escalation is simply the hackers’ choice to “work harder”. The email accounts have probably been compromised due to stolen login credentials through phishing or malware, and users are being directed towards the company’s security advice page.