A new type of spam?

Hopefully Justin or someone else in the antispam community will browse past here and tell me I’m way behind the times, but I’m seeing a new type of spam in the last couple of day, stock shills with dynamically-generated subject lines that appear to come from news feeds. The news items are usually up to date, and the “More” is often appended to the subject to make it look even more like an email feed.

I don’t think I’ve seen it done in this sophisticated a manner before, although the bodies are still woefully amateurish, with the result than most of the messages are tagged correctly as spam and sidelined on the server.

That being said, the bodies don’t seem to focus on a particular stock symbol at all, which makes me wonder if they’re rotated dynamically, and thus perhaps a test run?

I hope not. We really, really don’t want to see spammers get too clever. It’s their relative stupidity that protects us from a real flood imho.

Here’s a screenshot from my quarantine:

Spam subjects

2 Responses

  1. hmm, I haven’t seen those ones — we must be catching them ;)

    however, we certainly are fucked in terms of smart spammers. The botnet situation is going to be critical this year IMO…

  2. I’d go so far as to say it’s fucked already Justin, but perhaps that’s just me catching everyone else’s spam; I never did master the art of not worrying about false postives and just dumping it. I wouldn’t mind if it wasn’t so easy to shut an awful lot of it down. The ISPs just don’t give a fuck, never have.

    I found myself wondering the other day what your setup is, do you have a tutorial out there somewhere on Justin Mason’s uber-filtering rig(s)? If not, how about posting one on your blog?