All Posts Tagged With: "spam"

My Twitter account has been public for about one month.  During this time, I’ve seen several of my tweets retweeted by accounts unknown to me.  After looking at the Twitter profiles, I figured out that these were automatic retweets based on a word or phase in the original message.  A few weeks ago I was slightly offended by the account @condolences as it retweets anything with the word “condolences”.  I also noticed one that retweets anything with “haiku” in it whether or not the text of said tweet is an actual haiku.  Last night I discovered one that retweets anything that includes the word “elephant”.

So I decided to have some fun and trigger these three accounts at the same time.  My challenge was to figure out a way to include “condolences“, “haiku” and “elephant” in one tweet.  I came up with this:

Within a few minutes I got the following:

A short time after I received this:

A just a bit later I received the following.

It was good for a quick laugh but I still wonder what purpose these particular automatic retweeter accounts serve.  There are others which have clear purposes like the one associated with magpie.  They seem to be Twitter spam.  I guess I just spammed the spammers.

(Note: I might have caused an infinite loop situation as well as I just received another retweet from @condolences.  And another from @haikutwaiku.  Oops!)

I received this phishing email today.  It probably got through Yahoo’s spam filter because it is image spam.   Clicking on the image in the email, takes you  to some site in Italy.

I thought it interesting that it targets customers of the State Department Federal Credit Union.  Perhaps the scammers are targeting this institution because they recognize the financial crisis that the banks are in right now.  Or maybe it’s something more sinister.

I would hope that State Department employees recognize this as a phishing email.  I would also not be surprised to see the number of phishing emails increase due to the financial crisis.  People already worried about the health of their financial institutions might be more apt to respond to email correspondence presumably from their banks.

Today I received my second email from the John McCain campaign though I’ve never signed up to receive such emails.  I’ve had this particular email account for 8-10 years and I use it to receive emails from tech sites such as CNet/TechRepublic and E-Commerce Times.  I’ve probably been subscribed to these emails for that long as well (note to self: unsubscribe).  At any rate, how did John McCain and the Republican party get my email address?  This is not an email address that anyone knows so it’s unlikely that someone I know subscribed me.  That, to me, leaves only one possibility: they bought it.  This particular address is a magnet for spam (I have good filtering on it) but that means that this address is probably bought and sold frequently.

Perhaps the campaign saw how well Obama was doing with his electronic outreach and wanted to do the same.  This election season seems to have raised the bar in terms of electronic outreach.  In previous elections, I relied on TV to give me information about the candidates.  Now campaigns are reaching out to voters directly, even inviting them to events.  I like that.  I don’t like, however, that I’m receiving emails to which I did not subscribe.

This is hilarious so I had to post it. It appears that spammers are resorting to ASCII art to avoid getting caught by spam filters. What year is it again?

Click on the image to view the actual text.

Is this a new trend for spam or is this an isolated incident? Is this because emails containing only an image are getting caught by spam filters more often? I definitely don’t know this as I am not in the spam business but I imagine some spammer R&D guy like “I have an idea. How about ASCII art? The filters would never catch it.”

If you are interested in reminiscing about green bar paper and dot matrix printers, you can generate your own ASCII art with this ASCII Generator. I made this:

oooo                  oooo  oooo
`888                  `888  `888
 888 .oo.    .ooooo.   888   888   .ooooo.
 888P"Y88b  d88' `88b  888   888  d88' `88b
 888   888  888ooo888  888   888  888   888
 888   888  888    .o  888   888  888   888
o888o o888o `Y8bod8P' o888o o888o `Y8bod8P'

When I was young (and sometimes now) I insisted on not filling in the Mr./Mrs./Ms./Miss check box on forms. “They don’t need to know all that,” I insisted. Apparently when you don’t fill that in it is assumed that you are male.

Interestingly this reminds me of a former job when I would be working with many people from across IT. The company’s IT department was very large so this would be primarily through email. There were a lot of people from Asian countries who thought that Kenya was my family name and Raabe (former last name) was my personal name probably because of the way their names were represented in email. They would refer to me in emails as “him” and “he”. I never really said anything to them but it was kind of funny. It probably helped things go smoother as well as I didn’t have to deal with the “oh you’re a woman” B.S. that I run into a lot. At any rate, they would find out on the phone that their assumption was wrong.

Update: I just received something in snail mail addressed to Mr. Kenya Allmond soliciting donations for Thanksgiving dinners for the homeless.