Over the last few days, I've seen another interesting new phenomenon related to stock spam. I've received a large number of spams carrying some of the typical stock spam subject lines (I have a complete list, thanks to a spammer who inadvertently posted his random subject file instead of his stock pitch) but with a body that consists of a few lines of random character strings. This might be just another configuration problem - the random strings were intended to be hashbuster text on the end of a stock pitch, but the file containing the pitch somehow went missing - but it could also be a deliberate attempt to 'poison' Bayesian filters by seeding them with garbage text. If this is the case, the use of typical stock spam subject lines may indicate that it is specifically targeting Bayesian filters used to identify stock spam.
Little drop of poison
Posted by spamnation on June 12, 2006 09:48 AM | Permalink
Tags: poison, hashbuster text, Bayesian filters, stock spam, random characters