April 2006 Archives

John Aycock and Nathan Friess of the University of Calgary have been gaining some attention recently with a paper titled Spam Zombies from Outer Space, in which they describe their expectations of how spam may evolve in future. The paper predicts that spammers will start using hijacked home computers as more than just distribution engines: they will actually mine the hijacked machines for information that allows them to craft spam that users are more likely to receive and read.

Among the usual scams in today's spamload was one of the usual advance fee fraud cons, pretending to be from a bank trying to identify the heirs of a deceased customer. It contained the usual teases designed to hint that if you were - or were willing to pretend to be - a relative, you could get your hands on some unspecified but presumably large amount of money. The mail claimed to come from a firm of 'private investigators and security consultants' called Ebanx Consultants.

The irony is in the email contact address that they provided: ebanxcon at mixmail dot com.

Lately I've been seeing some unusual spams. The subject lines refer to investment - 'offer for investors', 'want to invest?', and so on - and their bodies consist of just two lines, a single line of text promising the usual vast riches, followed by the URL of a website (a different site in each case). The sites indicated are about 'high-yield investing', a term that I hadn't seen before, but which sounds spammy as hell.