Mal-spam (or perhaps malspam) describes all forms of malicious spam sent with malicious intent. Mal-spam includes: phishing, spear-phishing, whaling,
baiting, pretexting, among others.
- Payloads can include: Malicious attachments, links to malicious web pages, enticements to perform transactions, ransomware,
key loggers, etc.
- Bad things that can happen: man-in-the-middle attacks (woman-in-the-middle attacks too), network compromise, zombie botnets, insertion of zero-day exploits, viruses,
trojan horses, rootkits, backdoors,
job scams and other scams and code with malicious intent.
- Mal-spam can be
hard to spot due to: Sender address spoofing, content that replicates legitimate senders, etc.