In
this article we dissect a spam message,
learn why unsubscribing from spam
usually WON'T work & learn how
to tell who REALLY sent it. (article
3)
Hello campers, today we are going
to go deep into the black heart
of spam emails, we are going to
find out what is harmful, and what
is just plain annoying. We will
learn what not to do when in the
presence of spam, why you see what
you see when you look at spam, which
I highly advise not doing for long
periods of time. I have long speculated
that focusing on spam messages for
lengthy periods of time affects
your IQ. So sit back and enjoy this
third installment of our Anti-Spam
tutorials: Spam the Even Uglier
Underside.
First thing we need is a spam to
examine, this won’t take long…
I’ll just monitor my email
for the next few seconds, one should
be arriving any min… There
we go, just what I was looking for,
oh no wait, there must be some mistake,
this email is for a dating service,
I am married, jeez they sure messed
sending this one. Well, this email
is not as offensive as some, but
for the sake of educational purposes,
this one will do nicely.
One of the first things I like to
point out to people less familiar
with these hideous beasts is the
reproductive organs. To find these,
just peruse lightly for the word
“unsubscribe” or something
similar, you see there it is. All
you have to do to make a spam reproduce
is to click that link. The gestation
period for new spam ranges from
just a few minutes to several days,
and a litter of spam can run into
the hundreds. In fact that link
is your ticket to immortality in
a spammer’s database. How
is that you say? How can someone
legally say they are going to quit
sending emails to your address if
you unsubscribe and then keep sending
them? Simple, most of the unsubscribe
links you will see are bogus, either
the page doesn’t work or the
page isn’t there at all, in
either case, their web server got
a specially crafted web request
that tells them your email is live.
Other unsubscribe pages work just
fine, you put in the email you want
removed from their database, and
they respond with “Your email
will be removed from our system
within 72 hours” or some such
nonsense. Even if they are going
to honor that statement, nothing
prevents them from selling your
VERYIFIED email address to countless
other spammers before doing so.
Congratulations, you just made spam
blocking 10 times harder, and they
aren’t going to forget the
fact that this is a real email address
anytime soon.
So let us continue our examination,
don’t these spam emails have
lots of pretty pictures? I wonder
how they get all those pictures
in such a small email? Well let
us see… If you “right
click” (that is use the alternate
mouse button) with the mouse over
a spam.,. CAREFUL not the use the
regular click, you might accidentally
trigger reproduction. As I was saying,
if your right click with your mouse
over a spam email, a small context
menu should pop up with an option
to “View Source”. This
is what we want to do, so select
it. If everything went well, you
are now looking at the guts of this
spam, there probably isn’t
all that much. One of the tell tale
signs of a spam is that all of its
pictures are links to websites.
This reduces the size of the email
and therefore it reduces the time
it takes to send them. If you know
how to read html, have a look they
do some interesting things to try
to mask their URLs, otherwise just
close this window. A technique that
spammers use with linked pictures
is called “Beaconing”.
A beacon is a link to a picture
or file, that is created in such
a way it identifies the person looking
at their picture. If you read email
like most of us, through preview
pane, then you are most likely triggering
those beacons by just having them
in your inbox. Scary thought.
Upon further investigation, you
will find a few more items (although
these are much more benign than
the aforementioned ones). Let’s
just see who sent it to you…
[email protected], very
unlikely that’s really who
sent it. Actually the person sending
the mail can put just about anything
in there, my favorite is when they
put my name in the “from”
field. Like I am so oblivious to
things that I would click on a Viagra
link I sent myself…
Another element you might notice
on the page is a ton of misspelled
words. No, its not that the person
sending the spam is really that
stupid… Well okay maybe they
are, but this isn’t proof
of it. These misspelled words are
attempts at circumventing “content
filters”. We will be discussing
those at length in a future article
so, for now, if you are unfamiliar
with content filters, all you need
to know is that they search for
specific words, and if they find
them, they drop the entire message.
Something else you might see peppered
throughout the spam is strings of
random numbers and letters. These
help fool math based content filters;
again we will cover these filters
in a future article, all you need
to know is that it makes the spam
harder to detect.
Well, we have looked at this spam
for about as long as I can stomach,
so lets close this one up and clear
our mind of all those ugly thoughts.
In our next exciting issue we will
cover a very important issue when
it comes to spam: Why me? So until
next time, remember to have fun
and take care.
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