Spam subject:
this going to expolad
It’s a stock spam, and what they’re trying to say is “This is going to explode.” But doesn’t “Expo-Lad” sound like a character from the Legion of Super-Heroes?
Just imagine:
“No one wants to come to our convention! What can we do?”
“Never fear! Expo-Lad will save us!”
Update: I can’t believe I didn’t think of this earlier, but maybe ExpoLad is related to TypoLad!
It seems obvious that different email addresses get different types of spam. I recently noticed that even addresses with nearly identical exposure sometimes end up with wildly different collections.
A number of our spamtrap addresses are “seeded” by hiding them on websites. Put it somewhere that no human visitor will notice, ’cause the harvesting bots will see it anyway. There’s a whole set scattered across this domain, for instance, and even the spamtraps hidden in different areas of this site attract different types of spammers.
My Flash site is the most high-trafficked section on here. Spamtraps there seem to pick up mostly ads for dubious pharmaceuticals, and occasionally mortgage offers. It’s also the most heavily linked-to section, so this is probably the target of spiders that jump from site to site.
The remnants of my Les Misérables site wouldn’t seem to be terribly popular with spammers, but it turns out spamtraps on those pages pick up quite a bit…mostly in Chinese. Back when the site was active, it got linked to by a lyrics site in Taiwan. When it went more-or-less offline, the link stayed.
Spamtraps rotated through the top page of the site seem to collect mostly porn. I’m guessing there’s a class of bots that just look for valid domain names and hit the home page… and they’re mostly used by porn spammers.
The last area of the site that gets lots of spam is this blog. And it seems to collect all of the above.
Some recent bizarre-but-true spam subjects:
Dinky $ch001girl$ of the universe
Obviously trying to avoid keyword filters (not that it helped), but come on—“dinky?” When was the last time you saw that applied to a person? And what exactly is a “schoolgirl of the universe?” It sounds like a new anime series or something, with schoolgirls and jet packs, roaming the galaxy to defeat evildoers.
trill boxing
It’s the fight of the 24th Century! In this corner: Curzon Dax! In this corner: Odan! Who will win? All I know is it won’t be my free time; when I looked up the names, I found Memory Alpha, a Star Trek wiki with waaay too much info. And there’s all kinds of stuff that’s happened since I stopped watching in the mid-1990s.
It lets a woman ride you like you’ve never been ridden before!
Sent to a spamtrap with a woman’s first name. Sure, you’ll reach a few who might be interested, but statistically speaking you’re better off targeting men. Or, if you take it literally instead of figuratively, horses. Last I looked, though, there weren’t too many horses with email. Unless you count pwnies, I suppose.
Remember how LiveJournal, TypePad, and related sites were down the other day? The official line was that “Six Apart has been the victim of a sophisticated distributed denial of service attack.”
It turns out that the DDOS wasn’t aimed at 6A, LJ, or any other part of their network. It was aimed at Blue Security, an anti-spam company, who decided to re-route their web traffic to their blog—a blog hosted on TypePad. So instead of their own site going down, it took out Six Apart’s entire network of millions of bloggers.
Classy move, guys.
I do admire Six Apart’s restraint in not pointing fingers themselves. If it had been my site (though in a way, I suppose it was, since I’ve got an LJ blog, even if I don’t update it very often), I would have been royally pissed off.
Sure, Blue Security didn’t launch the attack—but they did choose where to redirect it. Maybe they thought Six Apart would be able to handle it. Maybe they thought the attackers were targeting them by IP and not domain name. Maybe they were panicked and didn’t think. Maybe they thought things through, but 6A got bitten by the now-all-too-familiar law of unintended consequences. They could easily have pointed their domain name at empty IP space, or to localhost. Redirecting it to a third party was less like deflecting a punch and more like the “Do it to Julia!” moment in 1984, or the classic joke, “I don’t have to outrun the bear, I only have to outrun you.”
(via Spamroll)
Update: Additional articles at Computer Business Review and at Netcraft, and a Slashdot story.
Update 2: According to Blue Security, the DDoS was not targeting their website by name, and the DDoS didn’t attack their blog until after they had already redirected the website. So it looks like it was less a case of them redirecting the attack and more a case of the attackers chasing them.
*Sigh* Must remember to collect all facts before engaging in righteous anger.
Update 3 (May 9): Apparently “all the facts” as reported by Blue Security don’t add up… (via Happy Software Prole)
A mortgage spam started with this line:
D r ear Home O u wne u r ,
OK, so they’re inserting random space-letter-space sets into the text. But let’s ignore what they’re trying to say, and look at how it actually came out.
“Drear” home owner? (Or rather, “ouwneur?” Are they French?) Apparently I picked up the deed to the House of Usher or some such miserable domicile. I can’t say I’ve noticed any ravens around (not counting my comic collection, anyway), though I’ve certainly been awake many a weary midnight.
