ASCII Art is Back and Not in the Good Way
SPAM! It is one of *those* four letter words! There is nothing you can do to stop it. You can tweak filters and then the spammers adjust their techniques. The latest move, ASCII art text.
“There’s been an upsurge in ASCII spam in the last week…It’s quite effective in getting through filters,” said Chris Boyd, director of malware research at messaging management firm FaceTime Communications.
But earlier efforts to use ASCII art for spam have proven to be duds, he added. “The downside is that 9 times out of 10, it’s completely useless because it’s almost impossible to read, or it’s a really bizarre picture of a naked lady that’s not clickable,” Boyd said. [...]
Google declined to comment specifically on ASCII art spam. “We expect spammers to use every means possible to try to send spam. That’s why we have a very robust spam-fighting effort at Google,” the company said in a statement. Yahoo didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Here’s why it’s clever. One line of the e-mail is “78 46 60 11 04 75 300 38 0348 18 61 55171″–gibberish that hardly resembles part of the word “Viagra” or a suspect URL. But reading it on my screen as part of the overall text, its meaning was clear to me in a flash. And a spam generation program could evade spam filter fingerprinting by randomly substituting other numbers into the text art. [via]
I’m shocked that ISP’s have not worked harder to use Domain Keys or other validation methods to reduce the amount of junk passing through their networks. Spam is not just a problem for the end user, it uses countless network resources of which the costs are passed to subscribers.
