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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."
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Love, Babelfish
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Oder ich hatte, wenn es nicht fur die Zeit, die zu ubersetzen.
You just got troll'd!
There to eat lemons, axe gravy soup.
Squirrel!
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...
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. ... 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).
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
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.
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!
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
I have to wonder if there might be a way to get spam filters to recognize machine translations.
http://www.aaronrogier.net
if automated filtering would be that good then you could use the same engine to make the actual automatic translation.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
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.
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.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
It will be an arms race all over again.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
Checking translation error patterns is not translating. I think.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
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.
Evolution - Est. 4500000000 B.C. Don't piss in the gene pool.
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
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.
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.
Soviet Russia was never funny... Also the meme was pretty boring to.