Spam of the dumbest

Filed Under: Spam

You have to wonder who the spammers think they are targeting when they use a subject line like this one I saw in a pharmaceutical campaign:

Survival of the dumbest

An interesting approach, to abuse your potential customers with a subject line like "Survival of the Dumbest"!

By the way, some of you may be curious as to why the spammers chose to write the names of their products such as Viagra and Cialis in columns rather than the conventional horizontal way. The reason is that they were trying to avoid detection by the more rudimentary anti-spam filters which might look for specific words, but find it harder to see if written vertically.

Indeed, if you select the text of this spam message you can see that the spammers have hidden regular words (using HTML to make them the same colour as the background) in between the letters of their products, in an attempt to make life harder for the spam detectors.

Spam trick revealed

Fortunately, Sophos's anti-spam solutions are smart enough to spot such trickery.. and we wouldn't have been tempted by the subject line either!

About the author

Graham Cluley is senior technology consultant at Sophos. The readers of Computer Weekly voted him security blogger of the year in 2009 and 2010, and he pipped Stephen Fry to the title of "Twitter user of the year" too. Which was nice. He was also named "Best Security Blogger" by the readers of SC Magazine in 2011. You can subscribe to Graham's updates on Facebook, follow him on Twitter and circle him on Google Plus for regular updates.