[CLUE-Talk] Gibberish in spam messages

[Jed S. Baer]

On Sat, 22 Mar 2003 21:27:14 -0700
"Matt Gushee" <mgushee at havenrock.com> wrote:

> Just curious--lately I've been getting quite a few spam messages that 
> include "words" consisting of random characters either in their 
> subject line or in their body. For example, today I got an 
> advertisement for grey-market pharmaceuticals that included the line
> 
>   "l echsb caafkekj wchbsxqnm ouz xkse gmokmuidtitfd gprc rm"

Hmm, when I ROT13 it, I get:

  "y rpufo pnnsxrxw jpuofkdaz bhm kxfr tzbxzhvqgvgsq tcep ez"

> Has anybody else noticed this trend? Given the frequency of this 
> stuff, it's got to be intentional. But why? I can't imagine it 
> improves their chances of getting a favorable response.

Actually, these things have been around Usenet for a long time. There's
actually a term for them, which I forget. But they're intended to defeat
various anti-spam filterings. If randomly generated for each message, they
would defeat a profiling filter, such as one which generates a checksum on
the message body, and rejects all messages whose bodies matched that
checksum. IIRC, there has recently been a distributed spam filter database
based on spam "signatures" which used something like that techique -- I
don't think it was Vipul's Razor though.

You realize, of course, that I will now have to Google through the night
until I come up with the term.

jed
-- 
I wouldn't even think about bribing a rottweiler with a steak that
didn't weigh more than I do. -- Jason Earl