Spam spam spam*

Category: Article

Every day I delete between 20 and 30 spam e-mails. I pointed out to my wife once that the writing in most spam was gibberish.

It finally dawned on me that spammers, being keen to find workarounds to spam filters, preface their pitch with bits of random prose so that the spam filters, presumably looking at only a few words or sentences, will let the message go through. In addition the spammer hides the real message from the Mail server inside a graphic.

Take the following spam message for instance. The message starts with random text then ends with an graphic image which contains the real message that the sender wants you to see. Because the message is a graphic image it cannot be analyzed by spam filters.

of women - them that would sell their shifts for ye, and the others. pieces of the song, with a great deal of boggling and much expressed was done, My dear fellow, my dear son, he cried out, this is more on James More. Then I think we were none so unhappy when we dwelt

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In addition to sneaking past spam filters this kind of graphic message, if sent for more nefarious purposes, can result in the reader launching a virus when one clicks on a graphic thinking they are clicking on text.

It looks like Internet Service Providers need to start building Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems that can also analyze text hidden in graphic images.

*Title courtesy of the Monthy Python ‘Eggs, Sausage and Spam’ sketch.