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New spammer strategy

Posted: 2003-09-28 04:45am
by Darth Wong
Have you been getting a lot of spam with garble in the subject line and message body, like:

"Make $50,000 a year sz487z67io.se7w5l8iw75wl,iws"?

If you're curious, this appears to be their latest tactic to get around spam filters. Most spam filters look for recognized patterns and a lot of them compare the ratio of common spam phrases to unrecognized text. This tactic is intended to pump a lot of unrecognized text into the E-mail so that the spam filter will play it safe and not kill it.

As always, DEATH TO SPAMMERS!!!

I so wish that these ass-clowns could be hauled out into a public square and beaten to within an inch of their lives.

Posted: 2003-09-28 06:57am
by Spyder
Started getting those, haven't had too many though. Also of note most of USENET is getting spammed with posts containing links to .scr files.

Posted: 2003-09-28 07:27am
by Archaic`
I tend to get a lot of them on my hotmail account, though the spam filters there, amazingly , seem to work on them just fine.

Posted: 2003-09-28 07:40am
by EmperorMing
Archaic` wrote:I tend to get a lot of them on my hotmail account, though the spam filters there, amazingly , seem to work on them just fine.
Yeah, I've noticed that too. Go figure... :evil:

Posted: 2003-09-28 10:09am
by 2000AD
I always seem to get emails from dsfvbfibfdiugb@dosndosf.com or something like that. It's bloody annoying.

Posted: 2003-09-28 10:46am
by Companion Cube
Hell, I get about 10 badly-spelt variations of 'Do you want a penis enlargement' every few hours or so. Thankfully, that's on one of my secondary accounts...

Posted: 2003-09-28 12:37pm
by Alan Bolte
Yeah, just about every message I get is one of those with a character string. My real problem is that half of them come with some sort of damn 144k attachment labeled as a Microsoft update or something. My account is always full now, so I don't know if I'm missing e-mails.

Posted: 2003-09-28 12:41pm
by Stravo
Here's my ultimate question regarding Spammers. Do people actually buy their products through the spam email. Seriously, how much money can they possibly make with those annoying emails?

Posted: 2003-09-28 01:07pm
by Nova Andromeda
--This type of evasion has been around for a while. I've gotten e-mails like that for over five years now...

Posted: 2003-09-28 01:10pm
by TrailerParkJawa
Stravo wrote:Here's my ultimate question regarding Spammers. Do people actually buy their products through the spam email. Seriously, how much money can they possibly make with those annoying emails?
Somebody is buying stuff otherwise they would not be in business. There are spammers however who are looking for weak computers that can be exploited. I suppose those are not really spammers but hackers.

Spammers also look for open relays on the internet and use someone else's email server to do their dirty work. Goes a long way to tell you what kind of people these folks are.

As for the spam Mike speaks of, Ive abandoned my PacBell email for another. I dont get any spam to the new one and jelously guard it. I only got one spam in the last year. My Yahoo account is full of spam, but I just delete everything in the bulk email folder without looking.

Posted: 2003-09-28 01:50pm
by Darth Mall
Yeah I got a lot of spam like that, but with AOL 9.0 i can tell to filter out emails with certain words in it even if it is something like "makeyourpenislarger" with no space. hven't gotten any spam since i got 9.0 :twisted:

still aol blows

Posted: 2003-09-28 01:57pm
by darthdavid
You do realize that you can do the same with mozilla mail, and you don't have to pay a cent for it.

Posted: 2003-09-28 01:58pm
by Typhonis 1
Public floggins....sounds too good for the Mike maybe adding to it cleaning up after a Trek convention Jolene Blaylock and Jeri Ryan have been to would be a good additional punishment

Posted: 2003-09-28 02:08pm
by Hobot
Spam Assassin is god

http://www.spamassassin.org/

It gets about 90% to 95% of my spam, Netscape mail (7.1) gets just about everything else (very occasionally one or two slip through).

Posted: 2003-09-28 02:53pm
by Pu-239
I use bogofilter+kmail.

BTW, I have 806 spams in my spam archive, if anyone want's them for training spam filters. They are in the form of each spam in an individual file with random names. You'll have to sed jhnphm_@_yahoo.com (remove the underscores) out and replace with your email address. Also, I set bogofilter to put spam statistics in, so you have to remove those too.

Re: New spammer strategy

Posted: 2003-09-28 02:57pm
by Pu-239
Darth Wong wrote:Have you been getting a lot of spam with garble in the subject line and message body, like:

"Make $50,000 a year sz487z67io.se7w5l8iw75wl,iws"?

If you're curious, this appears to be their latest tactic to get around spam filters. Most spam filters look for recognized patterns and a lot of them compare the ratio of common spam phrases to unrecognized text. This tactic is intended to pump a lot of unrecognized text into the E-mail so that the spam filter will play it safe and not kill it.

As always, DEATH TO SPAMMERS!!!

I so wish that these ass-clowns could be hauled out into a public square and beaten to within an inch of their lives.
Hm.. I thought the presence of stuff that is almost never in regular mail would cause it to be marked as spam, regardless of unrecognized text?

Posted: 2003-09-28 03:26pm
by Lord Poe
Here's my question: How do the people who are doing this block this spam from THEIR e-mail? I'm sure there must be some simple, Rosetta stone type thing they guard secretly that allows them to block their (and their friends and relatives) own spam.

Posted: 2003-09-28 04:42pm
by Rye
Hmm i seem to be having a rash of spam from <insert name here>@canada.com, and i already filled up my "@name" block filter thing.

Posted: 2003-09-28 04:44pm
by EmperorMing
Lord Poe wrote:Here's my question: How do the people who are doing this block this spam from THEIR e-mail? I'm sure there must be some simple, Rosetta stone type thing they guard secretly that allows them to block their (and their friends and relatives) own spam.
Good point. Or then again, maybe they don't.

Posted: 2003-09-28 05:07pm
by Darth Wong
I believe that the spammers should be rounded up and strapped into front-row seats for Celine Dion's Las Vegas show, forced to watch it over and over every night for six months.

Posted: 2003-09-28 05:16pm
by SirNitram
Darth Wong wrote:I believe that the spammers should be rounded up and strapped into front-row seats for Celine Dion's Las Vegas show, forced to watch it over and over every night for six months.
And if I were really a Black Mage, I'd then ressurect them from their brain-explosions.. AND START ALL OVER AGAIN.

Posted: 2003-09-28 05:24pm
by RogueIce
What's up with this "Hey there <First name> frost? thing I keep getting?

Posted: 2003-09-28 10:20pm
by RedImperator
If only one person out of a million buys a product advertised by spam E-mail, the spammers make a gigantic profit. There's almost zero overhead in spamming. For spamming to die out, EVERYBODY has to stop buying from spammers. The same goes for telemarketing (though telemarketers have enormous overhead by comparison).

Posted: 2003-09-28 10:28pm
by Hamel
Spamming is never, [Y2j]eeeeeeeeeeever[/Y2j] going to go away

Organize a blacklist, and you'll get DDOS attacks up the.. big butt
Either that, or suffer a bunch of hired fucks spamming up your usenet board with lies about their "legitimate" business getting cut off from the rest of the net

Posted: 2003-09-28 10:33pm
by Crayz9000
SirNitram wrote:And if I were really a Black Mage, I'd then ressurect them from their brain-explosions.. AND START ALL OVER AGAIN.
I'm somehow reminded of Gary Mitchell putting Voyager's destruction into an infinite loop just so he could watch Janeway die repeatedly.