Not That You Asked

Spammers Text Tricks

As discussed in my last most, Sneaky Email Sucks, spammers are driven to find clever ways to represent (or mis-represent I guess) text or words in their messages.

Since text can be easily analyzed and through bayesian processes deemed “spammy” or “not spammy” rather easily, spammers try to do things like use images to print their text on instead. When anti-spammers countered that by hash analysis/fingerprinting the images for comparison, spammers added random noise to their images. The text obfuscation battle continues.

In this case, the spammer cleverly uses basic HTML table, coloring various cells in the rows and columns to spell out “V I A G R A”. It reminds me of when occupants of tall buildings in a city somewhere, for a special event like the Superbowl, or maybe just a stunt for a TV comercial, turns on lights only in particular windows of the skyscraper for the same effect.

It’s the first time I’ve seen this HTML table approach to slipping spam in (and it got into my inbox in Outlook) – so while I can’t say that it is a new technique for sure, it seems to have worked. No doubt the filtering companies will pick up on this one. Gosh it’s easy to break systems – Captain Obvious here I know – it is much easier to be a bad guy than a good guy with email. That blows.

This is a simple example of text obfuscation – if you want to really geek out on the subject, check out the paper: Fighting Unicode-Obfuscated Spam.

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Template Update

Depending on whether you read this blog through an RSS feed aggregator or not, you may or may not have noticed the new site template. One of the things I really like about WordPress is that it is ridiculously easy to update the site template. I mentioned back in February that I migrated from Moveable Type to WordPress for what ammounted to various usability and administration issues like this.

Updating themes is easy. First you have to download a theme from somewhere. I had been browsing themes.wordpress.com, though now that I poke around, I can see that there are many other WordPress theme sites. In fact this site also has the theme I’ve just switched too, titled Amazing Grace. Once you download it, unzip it and transfer it into your WordPress wp-content folder under “themes”. Once it is there, the WordPress Administration area just recognizes it – you click it and it is applied – automagically! You can switch back and forth from one theme to another with a simple click of the mouse. When you are used to typical web design and the effort it takes to develop different look and feel – it is a fun thing to do this and see a site change instantly!

So, this Amazing Grace theme is a nice clean theme that I chose for a few reasons. One is, I like the color scheme – it is reminiscent of the colors I use on tombartel.com. I like the neutrals – grey, taupe, black, white. Good contrasts and basic. The other thing I liked was the easy modification of the Amazing Grace theme to change the pictures in the upper right of the page to be photos that I’ve taken. There are a dozen or so that are rotated randomly each time you load a page. Go ahead, refresh this page and see. See? That was a fun exercise, selecting some of my favorite photos that I’ve taken over the years. I wish there was a description or label for each, maybe a hover over description, but there isn’t. I thought about trying to hack that in. We’ll see.

So, that’s my new template with WordPress. I hope you enjoy it for now – and knowing how easy WordPress makes it to change these, look for future theme changes down the road!

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