Spammers Latest Trick? Dumb Jokes

from the ah,-spam-filters dept

Well, now you've done it. All those stupid jokes you've been sending around as friend spam has made spammers realize that to get past Bayesian spam filters, they shouldn't just paste in the text from classic pieces of literature, but instead just toss in a few lame jokes, and watch the spam fly right through filters. The article doesn't make the connection, but it seems quite likely that the reason these get through more effectively than other types of text is because so many people bombard their friends with stupid jokes as friend spam.
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  • identicon
    w.h., 6 Jul 2004 @ 7:27am

    No Subject Given

    Indeed.

    Thankfully, most of the people I keep in touch with have grown up beyond the sending of especially dumb jokes, so they still get plonked.

    Especially because most of the time, they can be defeated on other SpamAssassin heuristics.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Fred, 7 Jul 2004 @ 3:04am

    Friendly spam

    I doubt that this method will break the Bayesian filters; or won't break them for long.
    The links point out previous technics, like word-salad, but that hasn't been successful, so why would poetry be? Baysian filters have no concept of context.

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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