Oddly Fascinating Spam

My day job, as I've mentioned before, involves administering the mail systems at UNH. So I'm hip-deep in spam, and (unlike most of you, I hope) I actually look at a lot of the spam that gets caught by our filters, making sure that it's being properly classified.

One current technique is to package a advertisement graphics attachment with a text attachment. Charmingly, there's an actual effort to make the text look "real", but without resorting to a canned script (which might be more easily caught).

So the generating script is apparently spidering around the web, yanking bits of text from anywhere. The result is bizarre and oddly fascinating. Here's one that came in this morning, enjoy:

It is recommended that you disable message broadcasts from your Windows Network dialog in the Control Panel. She stared, momentarily uncertain of the threat, but then she saw the wash of blue light and her panic galvanized her into desperate action. Now, by my holidame, What manner of man are you. I would strongly caution against downloading any zipped or archived file from groups trafficking this type of material.

Yesterday I couldn't see sparks without at least three or four of you together, but today it's all sharper, and more furious. The service can be started by running EventSinkHost. That thing is a black hole. Now he was by a pond in the infinity of the thistles, allowing his horse to drink, and she came riding up on her mare.

How can she stand wearing that. ZIP 4828 21-08-92 Motley Crue. Will be zero if Maximum Number ofVersions is zero. Additional Linux systems supported. Will be deleted by memDC. The resource directories typically have a default type like Bitmap for the group that contains bitmap resources. The data is a list of names. See section Year 2000 (Y2K) Problems. How can I use debugging. The pointer representing the interface for the object.

How can I specify to use the string resource in the DLL instead of the project's own. Weiramon entered last, his lordlings at his heels and a tight-mouthed scowl on his face. Pudgely is saying something, making a joke about how close they came, the others eke out a laugh, but Y. Who cares what they think. A while ago, Steve Kemp asked what will happen with backports. This deprives the security community of much-needed statistics and data.

A fine effort, but the message's spam-score was 12.882, well above the level that plonks it into my incoming spam folder. And, even when I choose to look at it, the best part is: I use one of those 90's style text mail readers (mutt), hence I never see the ads that accompany this weirdness. So bite me, spammers.

Where did that marvelous text come from, though? Literally, here, there, and everywhere. Googling shows (for example) that the "infinity of the thistles" thing is from The Satanic Verses by recently-knighted Salman Rushdie; a pirated PDF is out there on the Web. The "sparks" sentence is from From the Two Rivers: The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan. "Weiramon" is from a different Jordan book, The Fires of Heaven. "Pudgely" is from Neal Stephenson's Snowcrash.

And (to my surprise), a "holidame" is not some bimbo generated by the Starship Enterprise's holodeck, but actually from Shakespeare's Henry VIII, Act V.


Last Modified 2007-06-23 12:02 PM EDT