The Dorf Calendar

0 Malware, SophosLabs
by

The Dorf spammers are still suffering from ACS, what with the rather premature Valentine’s Day campaign. Perhaps they are attempting to emulate the millions of ridiculously early marketing campaigns attempting to entice us into spending our cash on trinkets for our “loved ones”.

Despite the Dorf spammers’ temporal incompetence we can spot a general pattern for the themes of their campaigns over the past few months. The themes reflect major events in the annual calendar, especially for the Western world:

  • October/November 2007 – Halloween
  • December 2007 – Christmas and New Year
  • January 2008 – Valentine’s

    • Let us attempt to predict the campaigns over the next few months, if possible:

  • February 2008 – More Valentine’s
  • February/March 2008 – Easter? What will come first, the bunny or the egg?
  • March 2008 – St. Patrick’s Day? Mother’s Day in the UK?
  • April 2008 – Preparation for Mother’s Day in the US?
  • May 2008 – How about May/Labour Day? 😉
  • June 2008 – Euro 2008 football (or “soccer”) championships? I think not.
  • July 2008 – US Independence Day?
  • August 2008 – Beijing Olympics?
  • September 2008 – ?
  • October 2008 – Halloween
  • November 2008 – Thanksgiving
  • December 2008 – Christmas/New Year

    • We may even consider giving odds on the above, assuming that the Dorf spammers last a whole new year. Who knows, they may tire of being thwarted on a regular basis or just retire to a beach somewhere with their millions.

    Our advice is to make sure you are vigilant enough to ensure that you do not get caught out. Of course, we shall do our bit by stopping the campaigns on both the spam and malware sides. The latest variant of the Dorf family is detected as Mal/Dorf-K.

    Free tools

    Sophos Firewall Home Edition

    Boost your home network security.

    Sophos Scan & Clean

    Free second-opinion scanner for PCs.

    Sophos Cloud Optix

    Monitor 25 cloud assets for free.