The Times: Tech column - Spammers' literary tricks/Virus hype/Urban myths
By David Rowan
Purveyors of spam are getting more sophisticated. To beat the junk e-mail filters that block their pitches for Viagra or printer ink, they are turning to children's literature. By including paragraphs from such authors as Lewis Carroll and L. Frank Baum, spammers are managing to over-ride filters that block e-mails according to linguistic analysis. One recent solicitation for penis-enlargement products, received here, ends with the surreal line: "Dorothy and the Wizard exchanged startled glances, for they remembered how often Eureka had longed to eat a piglet." Having traced the line to Baum's 1908 work, Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, we can confirm that penile extension plays no part in the plot.
Because the spam got through, the literary flourish clearly convinced our filter's Bayesian language-analysis software that this was personal correspondence. The practice -known as "hash busting" -also involves generating random word sequences that bear comparison with James Joyce. A typical example -in an e-mail selling search-engine listings -contains such a madly surreal string of text that it is almost beautiful: "Highland alberich rampart discovery barnet clothesman walpole boot brainwash ..." It may not make the resulting junk any more pleasant to receive, but it does suggest a whole new branch of poetry.
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If you wanted to know your chances of developing avian flu, you wouldn't take advice from a salesman peddling a miracle cure. Yet when it comes to computer viruses, we are happy for private vested interests to decide for us how bad things are. Predictably, this week anti-virus firms have been scrambling for media attention by denouncing MyDoom as "the worst e-mail worm incident in virus history".
If it can bring down the website of a software giant such as SCO, the coverage implies, shouldn't the rest of us be updating our security products? Well, probably, in the case of MyDoom; but it's about time we gave a disinterested government department, or an independent global body, the resources to determine such threats objectively and work to counter them. Viruses are causing serious damage - crashing hospital IT systems and disrupting air schedules. But while the Department of Homeland Security has started to educate Americans about specific computer-security threats, in Britain we rely on press releases from anti-virus companies. Doesn't domestic security deserve more than sales pitches?
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The urgent e-mail from the British Transport Police has been spreading fast, thanks to PC Denise Harris's determination to warn women of a new night-time crime at petrol stations. The warning concerns a woman who has just paid for fuel. As she returns to the car, the kiosk assistant calls her back and explains that he has seen a man slip inside the vehicle. She looks round to see a man running off.
As PC Harris's e-mail says: "The new gang initiation is to bring back a woman and/or her car. One way they are doing this is crawling under women's cars while they're filling with petrol or at stores." The e-mail fits the pattern of urban myths perfectly - no names, a terrifying warning, a plea for it to be widely forwarded (when we reached her this week, PC Harris said: "The fact that these stories are not true does not negate the basic message.") But what makes this particularly tasteless is that along the line someone has added an advert for their business. Urban myths, it seems, are just another e-mail marketing tool.
(The Times, February 3 2004)
Purveyors of spam are getting more sophisticated. To beat the junk e-mail filters that block their pitches for Viagra or printer ink, they are turning to children's literature. By including paragraphs from such authors as Lewis Carroll and L. Frank Baum, spammers are managing to over-ride filters that block e-mails according to linguistic analysis. One recent solicitation for penis-enlargement products, received here, ends with the surreal line: "Dorothy and the Wizard exchanged startled glances, for they remembered how often Eureka had longed to eat a piglet." Having traced the line to Baum's 1908 work, Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, we can confirm that penile extension plays no part in the plot.
Because the spam got through, the literary flourish clearly convinced our filter's Bayesian language-analysis software that this was personal correspondence. The practice -known as "hash busting" -also involves generating random word sequences that bear comparison with James Joyce. A typical example -in an e-mail selling search-engine listings -contains such a madly surreal string of text that it is almost beautiful: "Highland alberich rampart discovery barnet clothesman walpole boot brainwash ..." It may not make the resulting junk any more pleasant to receive, but it does suggest a whole new branch of poetry.
+++
If you wanted to know your chances of developing avian flu, you wouldn't take advice from a salesman peddling a miracle cure. Yet when it comes to computer viruses, we are happy for private vested interests to decide for us how bad things are. Predictably, this week anti-virus firms have been scrambling for media attention by denouncing MyDoom as "the worst e-mail worm incident in virus history".
If it can bring down the website of a software giant such as SCO, the coverage implies, shouldn't the rest of us be updating our security products? Well, probably, in the case of MyDoom; but it's about time we gave a disinterested government department, or an independent global body, the resources to determine such threats objectively and work to counter them. Viruses are causing serious damage - crashing hospital IT systems and disrupting air schedules. But while the Department of Homeland Security has started to educate Americans about specific computer-security threats, in Britain we rely on press releases from anti-virus companies. Doesn't domestic security deserve more than sales pitches?
+++
The urgent e-mail from the British Transport Police has been spreading fast, thanks to PC Denise Harris's determination to warn women of a new night-time crime at petrol stations. The warning concerns a woman who has just paid for fuel. As she returns to the car, the kiosk assistant calls her back and explains that he has seen a man slip inside the vehicle. She looks round to see a man running off.
As PC Harris's e-mail says: "The new gang initiation is to bring back a woman and/or her car. One way they are doing this is crawling under women's cars while they're filling with petrol or at stores." The e-mail fits the pattern of urban myths perfectly - no names, a terrifying warning, a plea for it to be widely forwarded (when we reached her this week, PC Harris said: "The fact that these stories are not true does not negate the basic message.") But what makes this particularly tasteless is that along the line someone has added an advert for their business. Urban myths, it seems, are just another e-mail marketing tool.
(The Times, February 3 2004)
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