Cybercriminals employ a wide array of fraudulent techniques to entice users into falling for their email traps. One such infamous technique that draws attention while we speak of various scamming methods, is ‘Spam Emails’.
Spam emails are one of the various pitfalls for netizens. These emails come with a multitude of capacities and can have numerous impacts on a user, even leading to severe scams. One of the spamming tactics used by spammers is 'Snowshoeing', which we will be discussing today.
What is Snowshoeing?
Snowshoeing is essentially spamming on a very large scale. In a snowshoeing campaign, the spammer may use multiple IP addresses in order to spread spam emails over various internet domains.
Snowshoeing technique derives its name from how 'snow shoes' spread across a large surface area. If you use a regular shoe on snow, it will most likely result in you sinking or slipping on the ice. With snow shoes, a person's weight spreads out more evenly, they are designed to have that effect.
Similarly, in Snowshoeing spamming, the attacker makes use of multiple IP addresses, rather than one, in order to consequently spread the spam load across various domains. This way, Snowshoeing spam could comparatively be very dangerous to its targets than many other spamming tactics.
What Does Snowshoe Spamming Mean?
Snowshoe spamming is a strategy in which spam is propagated over several domains and IP addresses to weaken reputation metrics and avoid filters. The increasing number of IP addresses makes recognizing and capturing spam difficult, which means that a certain amount of spam reaches their destination email inboxes. Specialized spam trapping organizations are often hard-pressed to identify and trap snowshoe spamming via conventional spam filters.
The strategy of snowshoe spamming is similar to actual snowshoes that distribute the weight of an individual over a wide area to avoid sinking into the snow. Likewise, snowshoe spamming delivers its weight over a wide area to steer clear of filters, expertly navigating them.
How does Snowshoeing work?
Snowshoeing differs from other solicited bulk mail and criminal spams, as in Snowshoeing, the attacker leverages several fraudulent business names and fake identities than just one, changing voice-mails and postal drops on a regular basis.
While a reputable mailer put a good effort to garner trust from an audience, and to develop a brand reputation by using legitimate business addresses, identified domains, and small, static, and easily identifiable selection of IPs, in order to present the audience with a legitimate identity. On the other hand, Snowshoe spammers make use of anonymous and unidentified "whois" records.
To further spread the spam load, snowshoe spammers frequently utilise domain assortments, which may be connected to many providers and servers.
Snowshoe spammers use anonymous domains, which makes it nearly impossible to track down the owner and report the spam.
How to tackle Snowshoeing spam?
In order to mitigate Snowshoe spamming, administrators may follow certain steps, such as applying policies hierarchically at the organization, group, or mailbox level. One may as well rewrite addresses. For complex, multi-domain environments, one may rewrite both inbound and outgoing addresses.
