Spam of the Tiger (May 6, 2007)

[Bandit LOAF]

We came across a strange blog article today -- it tells the story of a man investigating an unusual spam message only to find out that the strange text was a quote from Wing Commander: Fleet Action:

On to the content. The line “In our plan we already have our agents at work, weakening their will to fight, ready as well to kill their leaders of war when the time is right.” comes from the book Wing Commander: Fleet Action. This appears to be a very popular book, and you can get it, besides from that website, from Amazon for 46 cents. It seems unlikely that this is a marketing ploy for that.

What a odd story. I'm also at a loss to figure out how random web-extracted text helps sell anything. For those unfamiliar with the book, Fleet Action was the third book in Baen's original Wing Commander series. It was written by Dr. William Forstchen and is no longer in print. Read the original article here.


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Original update published on May 6, 2007

 

[Dundradal]

Man that is really really weird. At least they have good taste in spam filler...

 

[Death]

At a guess, the snippet was included as part of an attempt to foil content-based filters, like for example Brightmail (now owned by Spamentec... erm, Symantec), and the spammer was an idiot who forgot to include the true "payload" of the spam.

Not all spammers are that stupid (nor do I really fully subscribe to the "spammers are st00pid" mantra any more; things like the distributed spambots that hijack the computers of security compromise victims to send their spew [kinda like a SETI@Home for spamming] are anything but dumb), but there's a lot of them who don't even understand how to use the spamware they have to try to shove their spew into everyone's face.

 

[cff]

Its pretty common to write a multi part message when sending Spam these days. The Spam is a picture in the HTML part, the text part (that is supposed to be the same thing by the spec) is some random filler text. So all one needs is a mailer that can be set to view text mode and you won't see the true spam part even if sent correctly.