A Gallery of image encrypted penny-stock spam email attachments
For the past few months, I’ve been getting a lot of penny-stock spam emails. You’ve seen them before… they’re the ones that tell you to buy some random Taiwan-based stock that you’ve never heard of before.
The interesting thing about this new breed of spam is that, unlike your typical Viagra/Cialis/Insurance/PenisEnlargement emails, the content of these emails are often embedded in an attached image. Often the body of the content has a couple of random sentences to avoid Bayesian filters, but don’t be fooled.. the meat of the email is in the attached images.
The reason why images are used is easy to understand. Most spam filters identify spam based on the text in the email. When it comes to image attachments, most spam filters can’t understand them, and so the content slips by.
But the technology is improving. The most sophisticated spam filters can now parse the content contained within an image. In other words, software has reached the point where it can successfully read the text within an image.
To circumvent this, spammers are now intentionally obfuscating their spam images with colored blocks, bits of color, and other visual tricks to try to confuse the spam filters.
The visually striking results of this undertaking exemplifies the unending cat-and-mouse game that’s played between spammers and those who combat spam.
Below is a small collection of these spam emails that I’ve collected. This is by no means a definitive collection. Honestly, this is about 3 days worth of spam. I hope to add to this as the spam comes in…
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