24 July 2007 14:17 GMT
Broken spam campaigns
SophosLabs often sees broken spam campaigns. The campaigns can be broken for a number of reasons, incompetence being the prime one.
Here we see a mistake in the configuration of the spam tools used for sending out porn-related image spam.
Had the spammer bothered to test that their spam ran correctly, they would have seen a broken message like the one above.
The creator of this message actually wished the recipients to see the following:-
Spammers, and the people that supply the spam tools, are interested in making money. Unfortunately, the economics of spam dictate that the average spammer can actually afford to make the occasional mistake. These mistakes are costly to us all, however, because broken messages can be much more difficult to block.
Why? Broken messages often break automated spam analysis systems. This forces human beings, like me, to analyze the messages. While failing to line the spammer’s pockets with silver, these broken spam messages can prove even more annoying than any other spam.
Pob, SophosLabs, UK
