Results tagged “spam”

Though my spamfilters --SpamLookup in combination with Akismet-- catch really a lot of comment- and trackback spam on this blog, there is still too much spam slipping through. Since I don't have the time to check my site to see whether comment spam has been published, I have changed my configuration to automatically moderate comments and trackbacks on entries older than twee weeks on which no comment has been posted in the previous week.

This allows me to batch-process the moderation queue, while still making sure that comments on active threads still show up immediately.

In a perfect world spammers would get caught, go to jail, and share a cell with many men who have enlarged their penises, taken Viagra and are looking for a new relationship.

[Via Volker Weber]

I am happy to say that I rarely receive spam. But today a message slipped though my defence lines using a tactic I did not see before: they sent me a simple, innocent message with a Word file attached.

In my curiosity I opened the invoice.doc attachment, and was greeted with "Back2School Software":

Apparently the current generation of spam filters has gotten to the level where the only spam getting through are unreadable V1^Gr^ messages, and they are desperately looking for new ways to get their message across. Though probably many people that otherwise would read the e-mail won't open the Word document, the possibilities to create a readable message makes this a viable spam method. As far as I know, few spam filters look at the contents of attachments, but that is about to change.

At the moment the spammers are once again one step beyond the filters...

[Update 2006.08.14]: More and more bloggers report the same problem, and several experts discuss on how to scan Office attachments for spammy messages.