Alex Miller's technical blog
I saw a new spam innovation in my inbox today. It was an HTML formatted email, using a microscopic font that spelled out the message in banner form using random characters. So a portion of what I saw looked like this:
I’m surprised this hasn’t been used to greater effect before. Wonder how long it will take the filters to learn this trick!
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Hi! My name is Alex Miller and I live in St. Louis. I write code for a living and currently work for Revelytix on semantic web products.
In the past I worked for Terracotta, BEA Systems, and MetaMatrix. My main language for the last decade has been Java, although I’m interested in many different languages. I am the founder of the Lambda Lounge user group and the Strange Loop developer conference.
Catch me on Twitter as @puredanger.
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This is similar to image spam, where an image of words is used instead of the words themselves. This might work better since a lot of email programs automatically block images.
Spam is big business. Symantec has shifted a lot of resources towards spam and away from anti-virus. With more sophisticated techniques like this, they are reduced to using white or black lists.