New spam tactics

Both my e-mail and blog have suffered increasingly under a deluge of spam.  It either comes into my inbox or is submitted as comments.  Bah.  And spammers are getting smarter.

For instance, I’ve seen an increasing number of e-mail spam messages where the entire content is contained in a graphic file attached to the message.  If you display the message in HTML, it looks like a normal e-mail.  Since I don’t display HTML e-mail for security reasons, they show up as a message with a GIF attachment.  The idea is content scanners are unable to “read” the message, so they will pass it through since it won’t be seen as spam.

As for comment spam, I now see almost a hundred per day.  Many are still being submitted by stupid people who include a dozen or so links in the comment.  Duh!  That’s the first sign of comment spam and is automatically blocked.  Others are being more creative.  They submit a comment that says something like the following:

“Your home page its great”

“Your site is very cognitive. I think you will have good future.”

“Hello Jane, great site!” (yes, I have several that call me everything from Jane to Bob to Zephyr)

“I just don’t have anything to say right now.”

“Best site I see. Thanks.”

“I’m really impressed!”

“Great website! Bookmarked! I am impressed at your work!”

“This is a wonderful wealth of information. Good Luck!”

“Very good site. Thanks for author!”

“It’s my first visit to your website. After just a quick browse, I’m really impressed!”

“Just whant to say HI! I love this place!”

“Hello there! Just want to say that I find your site enough interesting for me. Usefull information and all is good arranged. Thank you for your work. I will visit your site more ofter from now and I bookmarked it.”

And the list goes on.  They’re generally quick notes that sound personal, but the author’s URI is a link to some prescription drug site, pornography, or other spam crap.  What’s even more entertaining, however, is when they use a more philisophical message rather than the empty blurbs shown above.  Here are a few examples of what I mean.

“Not much on my mind right now, but it’s not important. I’ve just been letting everything happen without me. I just don’t have anything to say right now.”

“I can’t be bothered with anything these days, but such is life. I don’t care. So it goes. More or less nothing seems worth thinking about. I’ve just been hanging out waiting for something to happen, but that’s how it is.”

“In the bleak midwinter Frosty wind made moan, Earth stood hard as iron, Water like a stone; Snow had fallen, snow on snow, Snow on snow, In the bleak midwinter, Long ago.”

“Education begins a gentleman, conversation completes him.”

And that list goes on as well.  Finally, there are the blatant link whores who feel a direct approach is best.  To wit:

Hello there,

I would like to offer an exchange of links between your website and ours, which have excellent Google rankings.
If you find such a proposal interesting then please send me details of your sites.
However, if you are not interested please accept my apologies for taking your time.

Best regards,
Lidia Sadlowski

sadlowski_lidia@o2.pl

Finally, there are those who obviously can’t read and try to stack a comment with URLs or linked images using BBcode instead of XHTML.  For instance, they include a bunch of URL links in the form of [URL=”http…”]site name[/URL].  Likewise, they try to embed images (most likely trojans or viruses or other malware) using the same style insert: [IMG]http…[/IMG].  This approach, of course, will not work here since I do not support BBcode.  Comments must be formatted with XHTML only, so at least this kind of spam comes through looking outrageously ignorant and uninformed.

Needless to say, the increasing amount of spam from both directions is beginning to vex me.  The e-mail spam is federally illegal, but I said in December 2003 the CAN-SPAM legislation would not help deter the growing tide of spam.  It also does not address comment spam, a new assault on internet users fueled by the growth of blogging.

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