Prosthetic Conscience

Clever Spammers

Had some interesting spam in my inbox that didn’t get automatically filtered today. The contents were pretty basic pump-n-dump stock spam (which seems to account for the majority of the spam I receive these days, filtered or unfiltered). The pump-and-dump spammers have been pretty sophisticated for a while about including chaff to get past Bayesian filters; it hasn’t worked very well, in general, but they’ve been working hard at it. The interesting spam today had the subject lines “troops should be”, and “Bush emphasized that”; the contents were their regular pump-and-dump pitch in mostly unobfuscated plain text. It looks like they may be counting on the flood of political mailing lists in this election season (and maybe just in the current political culture to provide camouflage to get them through filters. Or it could just be chance, and that was what got them through my filters. Anyway, it seemed clever, and I thought I would mention it.

[ Posted: 09:24] | [ Category: /computing] | Permalink | Comments: 0 ]