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Cyren Security Blog

The Cyren Security Blog is where Cyren engineers and thought leaders provide insights, research and analysis on a range of current cybersecurity topics.

Angry birds scam emails catapult into inboxes worldwide

What did we do before Angry Birds? (Halo, Tetris and Rubik’s cube I guess). Angry Birds has become the benchmark by which any serious operating system is now judged (“no it doesn’t support email but Angry Birds will work on it”). This sort of popularity is guaranteed to make anything a useful vehicle for spam, scams, malware distribution, and of course marketing affiliates.

And so we encounter the “Angry Birds Survey” which arrives with minimal text and a linked image that presents the question: Kamikaze Killers or Swine Snipers? Er… I just don’t know.

In the interests of public safety we entered the survey to see whether we might get a $20 iTunes gift card. After providing our (fake) email address and other details (address, birthdate, phone numbers), we responded to 12 questions posed on subsequent screens including:

  • Did we or anyone we know have a baby recently?
  • Do we own a cat?
  • Do we want lower auto insurance?
  • Do we plan to lose weight in 2012?
  • Do we get drowsy during the day?
  • Do we want an exclusive offer on furniture?

At the end of it all we were redirected to a premium SMS service sign-up page.

No iTunes gift card. – oooooh that makes me soooo angry…

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