Comments on: Joke Spam http://www.hyperborea.org/journal/archives/2006/09/05/joke-spam/ Sci-fi, comics, humor, photos...it's all fair game. Fri, 20 Nov 2009 23:03:41 -0800 http://wordpress.org/?v=abc hourly 1 By: Kelson http://www.hyperborea.org/journal/archives/2006/09/05/joke-spam/#comment-11778 Kelson Sun, 10 Sep 2006 03:58:01 +0000 http://www.hyperborea.org/journal/archives/2006/09/05/joke-spam/#comment-11778 Yeah, the image-based spams have made a huge jump in popularity lately, especially with pump-and-dump stock spams. An interesting arms race erupted a couple of weeks ago when people started tying <abbr title="optical character recognition">OCR</abbr> programs into <a href="http://spamassassin.apache.org/">SpamAssassin</a>. At least one spammer was clearly following the trend, because the spams started showing up with different fonts, with random noise in the images, or distorted like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA">CAPTCHAs</a>. Eventually they started using animated GIFs with several frames of static to throw off the OCR. The weirdest example so far has been the spam with "BUY! BUY!" instead of static, which John Graham-Cumming described (somewhat inaccurately) as <a href="http://www.jgc.org/blog/2006/09/subliminal-advertising-in-spam.html">subliminal advertising in spam</a>. Yeah, the image-based spams have made a huge jump in popularity lately, especially with pump-and-dump stock spams.

An interesting arms race erupted a couple of weeks ago when people started tying OCR programs into SpamAssassin. At least one spammer was clearly following the trend, because the spams started showing up with different fonts, with random noise in the images, or distorted like CAPTCHAs. Eventually they started using animated GIFs with several frames of static to throw off the OCR. The weirdest example so far has been the spam with “BUY! BUY!” instead of static, which John Graham-Cumming described (somewhat inaccurately) as subliminal advertising in spam.

]]> By: Jim http://www.hyperborea.org/journal/archives/2006/09/05/joke-spam/#comment-11776 Jim Sat, 09 Sep 2006 22:11:29 +0000 http://www.hyperborea.org/journal/archives/2006/09/05/joke-spam/#comment-11776 We've got a pretty good spam filter at work - it's a fairly large company. But what's been getting through lately is just a weird jumble of sentences that look like they've been pulled out of the middle of a book or someone's personal correspondance, accompanied by a <i>graphic</i> of what the sender is selling (lately it's been primarily stock and pharmaceuticals). It even looks like a personal e-mail (moreso than the regular spam) when it's sitting in your inbox. We’ve got a pretty good spam filter at work – it’s a fairly large company. But what’s been getting through lately is just a weird jumble of sentences that look like they’ve been pulled out of the middle of a book or someone’s personal correspondance, accompanied by a graphic of what the sender is selling (lately it’s been primarily stock and pharmaceuticals). It even looks like a personal e-mail (moreso than the regular spam) when it’s sitting in your inbox.

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