In Europe, Auto Spam Translation Kicks In

An anonymous reader writes "While spam levels globally remain at a two-year high of approximately 90 percent, some European countries are seeing levels of over 95%. According to a new MessageLabs report (PDF here), countries such as Germany, France and the Netherlands are being heavily targeted by spammers with automated spam translation techniques. The use of automated translation services enables multiple-language spam runs and is responsible for a 13% increase in spam levels in these countries since May."

Comments

Hey it me. We held last week, but you never asked

[FST]

Click here to get free Viagra. Cheap soft tablets can also specify a link to purchase. Cialis provide. Let your love life interesting.

Love, Babelfish

Netherlands here

[Zsub]

I haven't seen any spam in ages... Although that could be the work of Gmail's spamfilter. =)

Re:Netherlands here

[TeXMaster]

I get spam even in gmail

Re:Netherlands here

[Fred_A]

I get spam even in gmail

I don't see much of it in gmail, only a couple per day. But according to it's floating 30 day archive I get about 18 000 per month. English is by far the most common language although I see a little Chinese, French and German every now and then.

Re:Netherlands here

[Monsieur_F]

I was quite surprised recently when I received a spam that fooled the spam filter in my Yahoo! mailbox, because the subject of the message contained the word "viagra" (not even v14gr4 or the like).

I wondered whether that might be a way to detect people clicking on the "spam" button :)

Re:Netherlands here

[Lord Bitman]

me neither! Also, I seem to get a lot fewer emails from my friends and relatives than I used to, but they probably just stopped using e-mail because of all the spam. But that's beside the point- I haven't gotten any spam in months, so the filter must be working perfectly!

Re:Netherlands here

[kipin]

The only spam making it past gmail in my account now are very simple plain text ads, usually with a single clickable link to a yahoo group. They are all formatted identically (text is centered) and usually the text and/or subject mentions watches, although not always.

I hope you hit the "Report Spam" button which helps with identifying future spams sent using pattern recognition.

Re:Netherlands here

[SL Baur]

A couple per DAY?

That's a bit less than what I see in gmail.

Primera Publicar

[4D6963]

Oder ich hatte, wenn es nicht fur die Zeit, die zu ubersetzen.

Re:Primera Publicar

[davetv]

google translate gives me (german->english) ... "Or I had, if not for the time, Translate."

Re:Primera Publicar

[dkleinsc]

It could be much worse:

Wenn ist das Nunstuck git und Slotermeyer? Ja ... Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput.

Re:Primera Publicar

[Anonymous Coward]

prfft...

[ hums liberty bell march ]

Re:Primera Publicar

[Saint Fnordius]

"The producers would like to note that due to military treaties, the Joke as presented in this forum as well as all documentaries is merely an approximation. The Royal Army Comedy Force refused to give us a copy, as the risk of joke proliferation is considered too great."

After all, imagine if a spammer got a hold of it...

Re:Primera Publicar

[dkleinsc]

I'm not a signatory of that treaty: I'm a non-government actor engaging in joke terrorism*. And to answer your question, the spammer who read it would die laughing, thus helping to solve the problem.

* Dear NSA: yes, I'm just kidding around, and am actually a pacifist.

My hovercraft is full of eels

[ciderVisor]

There to eat lemons, axe gravy soup.

Didn't know this was news

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in Finland and a lot of the spam I got in the pre-gmail era was translated. In famously bad Finnish, sure. This must be AT LEAST half a decade old idea but probably a lot older.

I actually tried to RTFA to see if I had misunderstood what this was about or if there were other important stuff in the article but it is really short (Would you like to enlarge your 4r71cl3) so there really wasn't...

Re:Didn't know this was news

[Sumbius]

I know the feeling. I live in Finland too and this has been happening for a long time. The horrible translations are certainly made by a bad translation program and are quite "interesting" thanks to the errors. I can cope with the good ol' email spam but some web ads are just horrible and clearly fake scamming attempts and THOSE translated spams get on my nerves sometimes.

Re:Didn't know this was news

[BrokenHalo]

...and are quite "interesting" thanks to the errors.

Spam can be fun. I've started a party game where the contestants pick out lines or phrases from a bucketful of printed and cut-out spam text to construct poetry of any kind. The winner is simply the one whose opus is voted the coolest, funniest or most creative.

Still

[buchner.johannes]

Most of the Spam is coming from the US or US-based companies. Thank you CAN-SPAM :-(

Re:Still

[dargaud]

Most of the Spam is coming from the US

I don't know about that, but as a european with a personal mail server in the US I get and awful lot of spam in russian and quite a bit in chinese.

Re:Still

[broken_chaos]

Coming from and targeted to aren't necessarily the same thing.

That said, I'd still be willing to bet that any figures that say most spam comes from the USA are heavily inflated by the general number of computers connected to the internet - particularly the number of computers infected with some sort of botnet connected to the internet - and not actually directly from companies, organizations, or people based in the USA.

As an aside, I think one of the issues with the ever-increasing amount of spam e-mail is that addresses don't tend to get removed from spam lists - just added to. With time, the "send-to" lists would likely grow larger and larger, with a number of the addresses on them either being no longer in use or simply no longer existing. The attempts to spam them would still clog 'the tubes', but it might not represent a proportional increase in the amount of spam that gets seen by human eyes.

Re:Still

[dargaud]

addresses don't tend to get removed from spam lists - just added to. With time, the "send-to" lists would likely grow larger and larger

With the various honeypots generating random pages full of emails, how is it possible that spam reaches valid emails anymore ? There should be a 1:10^12 ratio of valid vs honeypot addresses, and even that should jam the biggest botnets since botnets can't wait for a returned "Invalid email" message to clean its list. Or am I missing something?

Re:Still

[Tony Hoyle]

USA originates twice as much spam as China.. the current most prolific spammer in the world is.... American (thanks to CAN SPAM).

Whereas it's much more multinational than it used to be there's one country always at the top of the list.

Re:Still

[kill-1]

Because not every domain has a honeypot? The spammers just have to check that they don't send too many emails to a single domain.

Re:Still

[Hammer]

IIRC a couple of years ago there was a massive effort to stop the single biggest spammer. A Georgia based man (that is GA USA)

Re:Still

[Hammer]

640k up and no cap....

Re:Still

[buchner.johannes]

I get an awful lot of Spam in Russian and quite a bit in Chinese.

If you use SpamAssessin, there is an solution: It implements language detection. If mail is in a language you can't read anyway, just give it a higher score!

http://email.about.com/cs/spamassassintips/qt/et032504.htm
http://www.yrex.com/spam/spamconfig.php

Re:Still

[Leafheart]

Don't worry, we Brazilians hate been behind you. We took away Orkut from you guys and will take the Top Spam position soon :)

Re:Still

[HTH NE1]

Most of the Spam is coming from the US or US-based companies. Thank you CAN-SPAM :-(

And the translations are due to French law requiring advertisements have all words foreign to the French language be translated.

Thank you, France! Thank you so bloody much!

(BTW, the Wikipedia page for the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages needs more information. For one, the two levels of protection are not defined.)

I will not buy this record

[Knoeki]

It is scratched.

Spam & Phishing !

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it is not only spam but phishing too that is booming thanks to antomatic translation.

Lately, users from Illiad/Free one of the major ISP in France have received Phishing emails that tries to get your ISP acount.
The basic technique is to claim your account has been locked because you did not comply with the contract service term. This is a realy good trap, P2P users might immediatly think ... doh, HADOPI's three stroke internet ban is already in action... I better take action. Then, the mail proposes to you a double-check from the ISP, and ask you to confirm all your credits (account and credit card number).

More on http://www.universfreebox.com/article8701.html

Fortunatly, automatic translation are still not perfect and you can see those fake are not from the ISP as the orthography is bad or the way of saying thing is not correct (clearly indicates to reader the author is not a native or official).
An example, the company name is Free and the signature written in spam/phishing is "free support" but it sounds odd as it should have been either "assitance free" or even "support free". But they are smart enough not to have written "libre supporte" or "libre assistance" or even worse "support gratuit", as you can get using automatic translation such as google.

Re:Spam & Phishing !

[johnw]

Then, the mail proposes to you a double-check from the ISP

This posting has been auto-translated from French - yes?

What could possibly be so exciting

[mxh83]

.. about this story that it hits the headlines in /.? Spammers and hackers will always find a way, we've seen that since the damn of computing. Without them, anyone associated with security would be jobless.

Translation quality

[VincenzoRomano]

is so poor that automated filtering could be put in please quite easily.

Re:Translation quality

[dunkelfalke]

if automated filtering would be that good then you could use the same engine to make the actual automatic translation.

Re:Translation quality

[sFurbo]

Hey, great, so, by being able to check a solution, it is possible to find a solution? I think you just showed that P=NP.

Re:Translation quality

[CrashNBrn]

Then the spammers must not be using translate.google.com, because that has enabled me to read websites and boards in german, russian and romanian.

Re:Translation quality

[VincenzoRomano]

Checking translation error patterns is not translating. I think.

Re:Translation quality

[Skater]

Word and the like have grammar checkers. I know they're not perfect, but they almost certainly would catch most spam... and they don't offer translation functions.

Of course they'd also catch many non-spam messages, too, at the highest settings, so the rules would have to be pretty loose.

Idiot badge

[Inda]

My spam count, in my Gmail spam folder, has recently jumped from 4,000 to 5,500 per 30 days.

Have another Idiot badge, you dirty spammers. Or get yourself a Gmail account.

My spamgourmet.com addresses have seen a rise too.

Have another Idiot badge. The clue is in the email address.

And finally, if you are going to send me Phishing emails, I bank with Natwest, not Egg, not Halifax, not Bank of America, Bank of... In fact, I'll give you my account number, password and PIN. The bills need paying at the end of the month. Good luck doing anything else without the physical card reader.

Idiots.

Re:Idiot badge

[BlackPignouf]

What I don't understand about spamgourmet, is that if I know that you used somecompany.3.yourid@spamgourmet.com, I could spam you on whatever.20.yourid@spamgourmet, right?

Plus, I'm sure it's linked to a legitimate email adress you care about.

Any hint?

Re:Idiot badge

[CrashNBrn]

Really? I think in the last two years, I've only seen 2 or 3 spam messages total.

As opposed to a newly created Hotmail account that received 1 spam msg before the day was out, and ~2 spam msg's every week or so.

As opposed to my yahoo acct, that I've had for 6+ years, and have used for anything that required an email online -- that gets ~14 spams a week.

Re:Idiot badge

[maxume]

If people aren't doing that, Spamgourmet is effective (I don't use it, but I was curious how far they took things). Even if spammers were doing that, you could set up a filter and have the option of dealing with those emails on a lower priority basis.

Also, they have a feature where you can require a changeable prefix in the address (i.e prefix.whatever..., anything without it gets ignored) and offer the ability to disable/delete accounts.

Hallo!

[Canazza]

Kan jeg spørre deg om litt hjelp? Jeg trenger en engelsk-norsk ordbok. Jeg forlanger å få snakke med den fem fem to diesel toget!

Re:Hallo!

[MrMr]

I think slåshdøt is brøken, I cån see the å's and ø's insteåd of [undef] chäråcters.
Could we get our old buggy version back?

Re:Hey it me. We held last week, but you never ask

[arogier]

I have to wonder if there might be a way to get spam filters to recognize machine translations.

Automated translations?

[houghi]

And you thought the English spam was bad.

I am still amazed that email is still used at these high levels of abuse.

Because your mailserver sends unsollicited mail!

[Jerry Smith]

SRSLY, i don't see the big problem in fighting spam. we have the technology.

my own _tiny_ mailserver (hosting about a hundred users) is effectively REJECTING spam using out-of-the box, not even customized technologies & services (thanks go to those who set them up) (policyd-weight, spamassassin, clamav w/ SaneSecurity). if false negatives should occur (never happened to me), the sender will get a non-delivery notification so he/she can act on it. large sites otoh should be able to fight spam using statistic methods.

Falsified reply-to address? Joe-job? Go do you home-work, boy.

Re:Hey it me. We held last week, but you never ask

[codeButcher]

My guess would be no, since if a machine can recognize a bad translation, it would probably also be able to use the same techniques to provide a better one - or at the least, come up with a number of translations then choose the best one from the bunch using the technique.

It will be an arms race all over again.

Re:Hey it me. We held last week, but you never ask

[Firethorn]

But on the whole we'd get better translators out of it, so that would be good.

Personally, I keep coming back to the 'put a hit out on the spammers'.

Yes, I know it's illegal and hard to track down the spammers, but surely we can do something?

Re:Hey it me. We held last week, but you never ask

[vintagepc]

too true... but if we get details on a "spam king" I don't see why we can't sign him up for every mass-mailing list (hard-copy AND digital) we can find... Give him a taste of his own medicine. If they try to sue, everyone will just laugh their asses off and counter-sue on the same claim.
Remember Alan Ralsky? The guy ended up getting _truckloads_ of mail every day.

Re:Why are spam levels still this high?

[Skater]

Spamassassin catches much of my spam, but I'm getting more and more in my inbox.

But your "non-delivery notification" is what the other person was responding to - you're effectively backspamming the people whose email addresses get put on outgoing spam. For some reason, this happens to me about once a year - someone will use one of my email addresses as the return address on a spam message, so I'll get hundreds/thousands of "your message was rejected because it looked like spam" messages, along with normal bounce messages. Of course I'm not out spamming people, but I have to deal with the crap by both spammers and by people sending reject emails. For these reasons, I'm with the poster above that said we should just put a bounty on spammers - I've spent far too much time dealing with the consequences (hint: It's not "just delete the message").

99.9% of my gmail spam is US based

[Anonymous Coward]

yep, if i just pick one (of the 5,000 in my spam folder) at random and examine the headers it comes from a US based domain, registered with a US based hidden private reg company from a US based registra, hosted in the US, on a US IP (connected with MZIMA or Texas usually), with Domainkeys and valid TXT records advertising a US based scam/company, the amount of foreign spam or from a botnet or China is so small its negligible

it would be simple to catch these people but yet nothing is done and my spam folder continues to fill relentlessly
it makes me wonder if the US is even trying to stop them judging by the persistence and regularity of the mail received

Re:99.9% of my gmail spam is US based

[Tony Hoyle]

They're not.. they legalised it. That was the whole point of CAN SPAM.

Unfortunately blackholing the entire US isn't an option (you'd lose slashdot for a start).

Re:99.9% of my gmail spam is US based

[Anonymous Coward]

so, nothing of value lost, then ...

Re:99.9% of my gmail spam is US based

[Runaway1956]

Isn't spam patented? The patent trolls should go after the spammers. Or, is there some sort of agreement that those in the shallow end of the gene pool won't attack each other?

Re:99.9% of my gmail spam is US based

[Kjella]

Unfortunately blackholing the entire US isn't an option (you'd lose slashdot for a start).

We could just blackhole post 25...

And spam filters suck against it

[shiznatix]

I live in Estonia and have been noticing this for quite some time. Funny thing is, I only get Russian language spam, a language I don't speak at all and never have been associated with speaking, no idea why the spammers seam to think I speak it. You would think if they spammed Estonia, they would do it in Estonian but I have never gotten any in Estonian. Even the company's inbox where I work gets only Russian spam.

It shows up in my gmail every day and what sucks is no matter how many of them I mark as spam (they are for sure spam, I got my Russian friend to translate a few and they are all about pills and whatnot) I still get them in my inbox. I wish there was a "any emails in this language are spam" setting but alas, there is not.

Re:And spam filters suck against it

[xlotlu]

At some point I started getting russian spam. Useless since I can't read it, but still annoying since Gmail didn't recognize it as spam. So I came up with this filter:
Matches: from:(.ru)
Do this: Skip Inbox, Delete it

It works for most of it, and the few that didn't come from .ru addresses I'd flag manually as spam. But I haven't seen one pass through in quite a while, so I guess Gmail got better at russian.

And some unrelated anecdotal food for thought: I started getting german spam one week after ordering from amazon.de.

Re:Why are spam levels still this high?

[Anonymous Coward]

But your "non-delivery notification" is what the other person was responding to

Yes, and he/she was wrong. I'm not sending any non-delivery notification. I'm rejecting spam, which means the mailserver checks the mail while the smtp connection from the sending mailserver is still open. if it is considered spam, it will not accept the message and tell this to the sending mail server. Now it's the sending mail server's responsibility to tell it's user that the message could not be delivered. Legit MTAs will do this (they have to) while spammers usually just drop the connection and move on. They even seem to remember this decision, i noticed a drop in incoming spam on servers that are not queueing spam.

Once again: As long as i don't queue a message (and thus promise to the sender that i will take care of it), i can reject all spam, risking false negatives (got it right this time)) as i know a *legit* sender will be notified by *his/her* mta and can take action (i.e. check if his mx is blacklisted).

That explains why I keep getting these

[codewarren]

Subject: V1agr4

Translation server error. An unexpected error has occurred and the input text could not be parsed. Please try again.

Why does auto-translation make a difference?

[johnw]

I've never noticed spammers making any attempt to communicate with me in my own language - I get spam (or rather, don't get - but it's there for me to scan if I want to check my filters are working correctly) in just about any language. The lack of an ability to speak English doesn't seem to have impeded them in the past, so why would auto-translation make a difference?

Re:Obligatory(?...)

[arndawg]

Soviet Russia was never funny... Also the meme was pretty boring to.

Re:An expected development

[Runaway1956]

"I can't see any of us (/.) asking for it "

They can have my spam when they pry it from my cold dead fingers!

Really?

[Zeikzeil]

"While spam levels globally remain at a two-year high of approximately 90 percent" I'm at less than 10% of what I received a year ago. That's like 3 spam messages a week.

Re:Hey it me. We held last week, but you never ask

[arogier]

But wouldn't an arms race be good for the economy?

Spamassassin FTW!

[Bigbutt]

Spamassassin :) Here are the counts from my procmail log since I started on my current mail server.

                Mon/Year Mail Spam
                Oct 2006 686 281
                Nov 2006 1661 694
                Dec 2006 2029 757
                Jan 2007 1496 616
                Feb 2007 1613 650
                Mar 2007 1979 842
                Apr 2007 1956 778
                May 2007 1846 755
                Jun 2007 1810 731
                Jul 2007 1978 25
                Aug 2007 2249 0
                Sep 2007 2229 1393
                Oct 2007 2187 1916
                Nov 2007 2378 2035
                Dec 2007 2381 2143
                Jan 2008 2453 2005
                Feb 2008 2671 2294
                Mar 2008 3084 2687
                Apr 2008 2971 2547
                May 2008 3289 2955
                Jun 2008 3346 3010
                Jul 2008 2983 2592
                Aug 2008 4951 4579
                Sep 2008 3911 3546
                Oct 2008 2189 1830
                Nov 2008 789 493
                Dec 2008 556 271
                Jan 2009 1231 833
                Feb 2009 2017 1657
                Mar 2009 2683 2199
                Apr 2009 4020 3562
                May 2009 4936 4519
                Jun 2009 3108 2216
                Jul 2009 3855 3330

Not just spam

[astralpancakes]

Advertisers on Facebook like to use translation services too, with similar unintentionally hilarious results.

No problem

[Fuzzums]

As long as they don't know how to check for errors in the translation.

Example: Dear has two uses. A formal and an informal one. If you receive a letter from a lawyer that uses the informal translation, it just looks stupid.

Re:Hey it me. We held last week, but you never ask

[Dogtanian]

if we get details on a "spam king" I don't see why we can't sign him up for every mass-mailing list (hard-copy AND digital) we can find... Give him a taste of his own medicine.

Won't that add another four inches to his manh00d and end shame at his tiny m3mb3r?

Oh... hang on, no it won't.

Re:Hey it me. We held last week, but you never ask

[vintagepc]

Nah; If I recall correctly, the only thing that gets any bigger is their egos, but that's not the medication's fault - otherwise people with small ones wouldn't have any self-esteem issues.

Re:Why are spam levels still this high?

[Skater]

In your first post:

the sender will get a non-delivery notification so he/she can act on it

Now, here:

I'm not sending any non-delivery notification.

Your new explanation makes sense but you have a statement in there that directly conflicts with what you said the first time (and flamed someone else for responding to it).

Re:REJECT != BOUNCE

[Jerry Smith]

Falsified reply-to address? Joe-job? Go do you home-work, boy.

if you have to be an offending smartass, at least read and understand my posting.

"the sender will get a non-delivery notification " : if the senders' address is not the spammers' address (gee, really?) the wrong person gets the notification. That is a FAIL, boy. Go do your home-work before acting here as an anonymous l33t mailserver-admin. It's crap wannabe admins like you that stink up the internet.

NL user with no spam in regular inbox here.

[DaVince21]

Huh. I live in the Netherlands and haven't noticed a thing. Must be because I'm using GMail, not an actual Dutch address.