Spam Descends into Gibberish
My spam count has picked up a little in the last week (to 75-85 per day) but most of that has come from spammers sending from their own servers (rather than botnets) using disposable domains. That the spammers are getting desperate is pretty clear. This morning I got a message that I reproduce in its entirety below:
mSvaqvpes voxvyenrp p5d0c%k wwkistsh
http://www.--------.com
mViAvLmIpUrM
gCpliAvLuIaS
xVqlpAoGjRqA
I thought at first that it was something sent in a non-Western character set, but wait: Eliminate the lower-case letters in the three lines under the payload domain, and what do you get? Valium, Cialis, and Viagra, the Three Stooges of the Spampharma Network. I suspect that the line of gibberish at the top is supposed to convey "Save 50%" but it took some staring-at to get there.
So spam has now become a sort of "find the letters" puzzle, and I can't imagine that anyone would consider this anything but a scam to be avoided. I have a suspicion that the spammer has become obsessed with getting past the spam filters at any cost-including the cost of making the message almost entirely unintelligible. This is a typical Right Man reaction, and I can just imagine the fiery-eyed doofus pounding his fists on his desk when the antispam forces get wise to his latest trick. Happy cortisol and have a nice death, dude-that's exactly where you're headed.
On the other hand, spam may be declining less because we've made it more difficult than that there is now easier money to be made elsewhere. I think that the people who used to spam are slowly moving on to other scams, many of them connected with online advertising. I'm seeing ever more "scraper" sites that steal content from other sites to attract search hits, and then display nothing but blocks of ads from various ad services. I need to do an entry on this; the Wall Street Journal recently ran a Lee Gomes column on the demand for "original content" from scrapers: Ad site operators paying deperate writers $2 for borderline nonsense text that exists solely to contain keywords calculated to attract search hits. People waved bye-bye to human-moderated site lists like Open Directory when Google appeared, but the scrapers may send us back there if search engine noise gets much worse than it already is.