SANS is reporting on a flood of IM spam, aka SPIM, that is pushing adware.

We have received several reports today from people that are getting flooded with SPIM on their IM accounts. These messages are providing a link to various web sites. These sites all seem to point to one site www dot messenger-tips dot com. This site purports to check your IM friends/contacts and report back to you which of them have blocked you. All you have to do is give them your login and password information.

Spammers are not waiting for the PDF spam boom to go bust, McAfee Avert Labs is reporting that spammers are now pushing their pump-and-dump messages through Excel files. The troubling part is that potential for combining spam with malware:

A worrying thing is that people may get complacent about Excel spam if it continues. Macro-based exploits are currently making a come back. Imagine what might happen if both the spam presentation and an exploit is combined. A person might open the spreadsheet and think that it was a pump and dump spam, in the meantime a payload would have been dropped.

So much for spam being a relatively contained problem. The lull in the storm is over. We obviously need to scan the contents of attachments and not depend on simple file types to flag spam.

To spammers out there: come on, it's July, don't you guys take vacation?