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Copyrighted Haiku Delivers Spam Through Filters
An anonymous reader writes "Remember that antispam company that includes a copyrighted haiku (which I can't quote here due to copyright reasons...) in emails vouching for their nonspaminess and thus bypassing spamfilters?
The idea is that a spammer using said haiku to get through spamfilters can be prosecuted under the more stringent copyright laws instead of the weaker antispam ones.
Well it seems said haiku has lately been figuring in a large spam run trying to pitch the usual medical remedies for various unfortunate ailments.
What do you think? Is it time to start filtering for haikus or will Habeas succeed in thwarting the spam attack?" We mentioned this brilliant anti-spam scheme last April.
Which would have taken any semi-literate reporter or editor ten second to find on their site. I guess that would have spoiled the illusion of a breaking story though.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
About 5 in the past couple days. I noticed the unusual X-headers and finally remembered what it was. Increased the SA score yesterday and now I get none! woot!
I can see this company being semi-successful in taking spammers to court under copyright lawsuits, however like the article says the latest rash is (not suprisingly) zombied broadband hosts, making their chances of finding someone to sue almost nil.
In theory the Habeas scheme is very clever. It's difficult to get spammers under any anti-spam law (where they exist), so change the ballgame so that you can prosecute under copyright law instead.
Unfortunately though, I suspect it's going to be difficult to track these people down, and even when Habeas do, they will need to mount a prosecution in another country - wherever that happens to be. The spammers may even win given that each country enforces copyright laws differently.
According to the statement given, the latest version of SpamAssassin should be able to filter these out. We're running what I think is the latest (2.61) and it still seems to be letting them through - thanks to the Habeas mark. I'm beginning to think I should just disable the Habeas rules completely and let these get scorded normally.
Joe-Jobs are made to order... Just send a bunch of mail through a rooted proxy, advertising the competition's stuff, and watch Habeas sic the lawyer dogs of war on your competition. You'd laugh all the way to the bank.
Same type of thing if enough spammers use this trick, the lawyers will be too busy.
Did Habeas actually think this was going to work? I mean, spammers are willing to do ANYTHING to make sure Joe Public reads their garbage. Constantly changing tactics to evade filters, to write viruses specifically to generate more open proxies to send their garbage through, to Denial of Service attacks against those who try to filter out this stuff, to garbage lawsuits. This is nothing compared to those..
People Talking in Movie shows.. people smoking in bed.. people voting republican.. GIVE THEM A BOOT TO THE HEAD!
Ok, so spammers are using haiku. If we only could convince them that harikiri is a spamfilter prevention technique....
This is my sig, show me yours
To disable the Habeas rule, edit file $HOME/.spamassassin/user_prefs
add line
score HABEAS_SWE 0
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Hey, and I forgot - What happened to the CAN-SPAM ? How long before we have Attacks of the CAN-SPAM-Resistant Killer Spam.
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
Another way these nonsense spams work is, in my experience, by having two different MIME parts, a plaintext part of random words, and an html part with the actual spam content. Since I don't use html mail, it works rather poorly on me, but I did once take a look at the html part, and it was formated text, not random nonsense like in the plaintext part.
Maybe this would help?
The Spammer's Compendium