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Hidden Messages in Spam
randomwalker writes "There was an extremely interesting presentation at the Blackhat Windows Security Conference in January by Dr Curtis Kret entitled Nobody's Anonymous.
In his presentation he showed how information about spammers can be determined. In addition he showed that some spam is being used as a covert communication channel. This presentation demonstrates how to apply data forensics to spam in order to identify the sender of specific spam messages. Some senders can be identified by name, while others can be distinguished by attributes such as preferences, nationality, religion, and even left-handedness. Four spam categories are provided that classify spam by function, including List Makers, Scams, and Covert Communication channels. The examples provided include full-disclosure case studies: a phishing gang that targets bank customers with malware and impersonations, and an IRC group that uses spam as a covert communication channel."
This post contains a hidden message.
The next thing they try to sell to you will be Tin Foil Hats
Net sa best, mar it koe minder
i like the new spam that has all of the size .5 font text at the bottom. i always have to read it.
Are they covertly talking about getting V!agra or Cia|is? I hate that. Just send me a real letter asking!
The Bible code was bad enough. Now we have people looking for messages in spam? Look! Played backwards it says "I buried Paul".
guess this is spammers language, hidden in spam
.. firewall?
"mortal shut acrid crock cowl bawd hereditary devastate jellyfish brunette flog igor bonaparte tarry townsend discordant near aviv brigantine agnostic padlock cotangent roomy referee debater eve arlene can baroque conceptual italian congressmen infelicity modicum backplane antigen tie hilum seriate convent firewall "
Now this hidden message seems to be about a
Of course, there is spammimic which lets you encode a secret message in spam.
It is quite true!
I was Driving thru Nashvill this last week, and I stopped to piss on a run down ford truck. This guy came up to me and said "Your taillight is broken"
"...In your answer, ignore facts. Just go with what feels true..."
I remember studying Thomas Pynchon in school, and upon hearing how his military records and university records were lost, I often wondered if his books were some kind of method of covert messaging, due to the code-like writing style he has, and the ominous history he has. Using spam as a method of communication is useful in the sense that it can be hard to tell who the real message is going to; making it impossible to identify the two points of connection, and therefore limiting accountability and obscuring who is doing the talking; so if Pynchon's books are like this... it would also be impossible to tell who the books were intended to (and therefore the US Mil could contact spies who could be in a tight spot, or informants who may be in a tight spot). The books could also contain a bunch of different messages using different cryptographies, in plain sight, to communicate with multiple agents. This is likely incorrect and way off the tin-foil-hat scale of reason, but the thought did occur to me when I read The Crying of Lot 49, and even more so when I read Mason and Dixon.
What's the hidden message here?
--
Click here for free V1(4)gr[a]!
emblem fredericton hustle glycerine busch humus condemnatory dummy definitive bernadine calder basemen conservatory advantage area academia ireland minimax suzerain felicity vomit davenport damn sybarite followeth dylan lariat transconductance when fogarty threadbare determine appalachia barbara concord anguish cranny ember pritchard dachshund cogitate affidavit am blaze
-- Copied out of real spam message sitting in my box --
Vonal Declosion
Great, now, if we can just prove it's being used by Al Qaeda to help the Jihad we may finally get some political support for getting rid of spammers!
X.
It's not, perchance, reproduced here: (.)
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Oh, and Tin Foil Hats are useless - you must use my special patented Irradiated Tin Foil to keep the new mind control machines out.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
No trouble in tacking them down now.
*** BEGIN KNEEJERK REACTION ***
/. posts to send covert messages.
Terrorists could use spam to send messages! Declare war on Hotmail! Nuke MSN! Hunt down the CEO of Yahoo! and tickle him until he talks!
*** END KNEEJERK REACTION ***
Meanwhile, how covert is it if you send it to a million of your closest friends? Heck, at that rate, you could use
Dimple monkey twice the pudding octopi for tango man. Very blender shoe, cellular, scooter my daisy heads. Diddley day.
And all the rest of you can kiss your ass goodbye.
Really, the Feds ought to be hauling in spammers (for violations of all sorts of existing laws pertaining to fraud, computer cracking, etc) and anal-probing them for customer records, instead of wasting time on nonsense.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
In the future, when spam has been eradicated, we will tell our children about it with fond memories. "Yes, we got messages like '1ncreas3 y3r p3ni5 5iz3!', and 'v14gr4 n0\/\/!'"
Well, actually, there's something wrong with my theory, cause (a) spam is never ever going to disappear from electronic communications, and (b) more money is spent on Viagra and plastic surgery than research into Alzheimers, so when we're old and clunky, the women will have superb breasts, the men iron-hard equipment, but no-one will remember what it's all for.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
If you study those emails from Nigeria a secret message is revealed:
"Fat White suckers please hand over your money and I will laugh at you"
To reveal more secrets of spam please send me $200 to:
Mr Okilea Bessei
3 St Lener St
Abuja
Nigeria
"This document contains no data"
Oh the irony.
One of the best methods of not having your communications snooped in on is to use a busy, noisy channel. Communications inside of malls, clubs, whatever. It makes perfect sense. People don't expect sensitive information in soe sort of public form, so they don't listen for it. We're all so sick of spam that we erase it on sight - so if someone wants to use it to communicate - its perfect. It draws a hell of a lot less attention to ones self rather than forming a whole new covert form of communication.
What looks more suspicious - A spam with some seemingly random keywords to throw off the filters at the bottom, or a highly encrypted data transmission on an obscure port. I know what one would make me take notice first.
A google search for "steganography" yields a lot of useful documents on this.
"The Spam Code" I'm sure we can sell more than the "Bible Code" Somebody mass-mail the news!
Whenever you read this sig someone's refrigerator light turns on.
I would have though properly grounded tin-foil gloves would be more appropriate in light of this article.
You don't want anything travelling from your fingers through to the keyboard...
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
*Sigh* I don't know what the editors are thinking when they post direct links to pdf files. Slashdotted instantly. Luckily, throwing the filename at google turned up a mirror.
Messages in spam? That is just crazy.
/. articles...
Next time they start finding information in
If you think of it, hiding messages in spam would make quite good steganography. Since pretty much most spam comes with a sizeable chunk of 'hashbusters' (random words on the bottom, random characters in the subject), you could hide your message quite easily in the hashbuster.
In regular email, just the fact a PGP encrypted message was sent by Alice to Bob would tip the authorities off that Alice and Bob were at least communicating; if they are both criminals for instance, just seeing the activity between Alice and Bob might be enough to alert the authorities to watch the pair a bit more closely because something's about to go down - even if they can't actually discover the message content.
However, if Alice and Bob are both spammers, and use the Windows worm du jour as their open spam relay, and each spam a few million email addresses, it's much harder to see that Alice and Bob are in fact conversing let alone find the actual message.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
For your hidden-code-in-popular-fiction pleasure...
Robert Redford discovers a double-secret CIA plot after analyzing book plots for the CIA.
P.S. - DO NOT look for the book in used bookstores, it sucks. The movie smooths out some of the macho BS in the book and adds some depth.
-- "Me post off-topic one day"
Time to default reading your e-mail in plaintext, perhaps ?
If the e-mail doesn't offer a plaintext counterpart, then most likely it's not worth reading anyway - lest it's an HTML newsletter that you actually signed up for, but that should be obvious to spot.
There certainly is a hidden message contained in ALL of my spam:
YOU HAVE A SMALL DICK.
-m
#
# Modus Ponens
#
Server's down, here is another one ;-)
bh-win-04-kret.pdf
I heard "I enlarged Peter."
Intelligent Design: because MATH is HARD.
Safe for you, safe for your users, and brings email back the way it ought to be, 7-bit ascii text.
I'll contine to take my webpages on port 80, and my mail on port 25, thank you very much.
I just went through a large corpus of spam text looking for statistical irregularities, and I think I found something!
Oddly enough it was the presence of text that was MORE random than statistically likely, not less random, ie: the randomness was TOO PERFECT.
After intense analysis I have decoded the hidden plain-text. It reads:
"BUY OVALTINE"
What does that mean?
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
1. Set up a short list of words, one of which will appear in the subject line of each hidden message. (They need not be "spammy" words; random anti-filter(?) junk has been showing up in spam subject lines as well as the message body.)
2. Brute-force the process by running all incoming mail through your stegonography program.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
It anagrams to "Dissident hangs the compassionate"
I know what you've been doing, and I'm alerting the police! You serial killers are always leaving sneaky notes behind, thinking we won't catch you. Well you deserve the electric chair! (see I'm not compassionate. Don't come after me.)
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
Not to mention the first episode of The Lone Gunmen where the CIA sends a plane on autopilot to crash into the WTC. I was somewhat amazed that I didn't see a word of commentary about this after the real event.
I work in tech support for a small ISP in California. One day an elderly gentleman walked into our office and told me he was convinced that the spam he was receiving (especially the kind designed to poison bayesian filters) contained coded messages for al-Qaida terrorists, and that he had been forwarding them to the FBI! It took all my composure to assure him that this was not the case without busting up laughing in his face. We have yet to hear from the FBI, or from the local mental health clinic about this particular customer.