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Spammers Embrace Classic Literature
Doug Caverly
Staff Writer
2006-08-02
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
I've seen spam messages with dangerous attachments, spam that tried to sell Viagra, and spam that tried to convince me to send money to Nigeria. Now I've received spam that seems to exist for the sole purpose of spreading random quotes from classic pieces of literature. Apparently this is a growing phenomenon.
A Techdirt blurb mentions an e-mail with the classic "two roads diverged in a wood" line, and Wall Street Journal writer Jessica E. Vascellaro has seen quotes from J.R.R. Tolkien, Daniel Defoe, and Alexandre Dumas. I wish now that I hadn't been so fanatical about deleting all my spam messages, so that I could give some more examples.
That's about all there is to these e-mails, though - quotes, or fragments of quotes, from famous individuals. Sometimes there are multiple lines arranged in a meaningless jumble. According to Carlo of Techdirt, "one email company says they make up 4% of all spam, peaking as high as 40% in June."
"The most common theory about these messages," Carlo wrote, "is that they're part of a slightly long-term attempt to confuse spam filters, in the hopes that users will label them as spam and throw off the filters so later spam that actually includes some sort of commercial message, gets through. Others say it looks like it's just the result of some sort of communications failure between a spammer and the zombie PCs they're trying to use."
Like all spam, this stuff is annoying. But as junk mail goes, I kind of like it - it's educational, right?
Tag: Spam
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About the Author:
Doug is a staff writer for SecurityProNews, InternetFinancialNews, SearchNewz, and WebProNews.
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