Everyone knows that spam is used to advertise all kind of products and that hackers use it in other ways (installing malware through exploits, etc.). The message usually links to an external site, but it's not always like that. We have recently seen spam messages about a deal from a Canadian company. The message was an advice to buy stocks from that company on Thursday, 21st September 2006.
How can we measure the success of the message? Well, let's take a look at the stock prices of that day:
As we can see, someone could earn a lot of money buying stocks, sending this kind of spam and selling all the stocks the same day, when everyone else is trying to buy. I have just received a similar one. This time it is a Mexican company, let's follow it up, tomorrow I'll publish the evolution of these stocks.