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SOME of
the spam I get doesn’t seem to advertise anything at
all—it’s just meaningless strings of letters. What’s the
point of that?
Junk
e-mail is annoying enough when it’s aimed at people
gullible enough to fall for its fraudulent pitches. But
now we have spam that may be written only to confuse
other computers. These strings of gibberish can be an
attempt to jam spam-blocking software, said two people
who work in the field. Miles Libbey, who directs Yahoo’s
antispam efforts, and Adam Swidler, a product manager
for the e-mail-security firm Postini, both suggested
that these nonsense e-mails are written to confuse spam
filters that look for patterns of language distinct to
either spam or legitimate messages.
When one
of these e-mails arrives, the filter essentially gets
clogged by all the garbage text. It loses its grasp of
what to look for in future messages; as a result, the
next round of spam can have an easier time sneaking
through.
Libbey
also suggested that some of these messages could be sent
by “bots”—computers hijacked by viruses to relay
spam—that fail to include the intended pitch of a
message. Swidler, however, disagreed with that
interpretation: “The spammer community has gotten pretty
sophisticated” in its use of bots, he said.
If you
do get one of these messages and you use a mail program
or Web-mail site that lets you mark messages as spam or
safe, tag the gibberish e-mail as junk; eventually, your
filters may catch up.
Whatever
you do, don’t reply to these or any other junk messages,
even just to curse out the worthless cretins responsible
for them. Doing so only tells spammers that you read
spam.
And, of
course, keep your computer safe from viruses, worms,
spyware and other intrusions. An attack that turns your
PC into a spam-relaying bot isn’t your misery alone;
it’s everybody’s problem. |
