As expected, the death of Paul Walker, the actor best known for his role in the Fast and Furious movies, has been exploited by scammers and spammers. Experts have discovered a spam campaign that uses the “Word Salad” technique.
The spam messages, which were detected by Symantec and have no connection to Walker's death, advertise cheap cable TV, Internet and phone services.
The «Word Salad» is a technique used by spammers to bypass Bayesian filters. The method involves the use of various keywords that are inserted into the email's HTML code, in an effort to break URLs and make detection more difficult.
According to experts, the latest trend in using the “Word Salad” technique is to insert keywords related to topics that have higher demand- in this case, the death of Paul Walker.
Also, Symantec reports that a fake news story has been observed claiming that Walker survived the car crash.
As with all major events, scammers and spammers are very likely to continue exploiting Paul Walker's death until the topic is no longer of interest. Therefore, it is important for users to be on guard for any suspicious email messages or messages via social media.
