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Experts at SophosLabs™, Sophos's global network of virus and spam analysis centres, have published a report detailing the most commonly used words that spammers include in their marketing messages but attempt to hide from anti-spam software in order to creep into inboxes. "Spammers have a dilemma," explained Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos. "They want to sell certain products or include certain phrases in their spam emails, but they also know that many people will have filters looking for those words and automatically junking them. For this reason they use "obfuscation" to try and disguise the words from the anti-spam software." Sophos researchers have found that the vast majority of spam - up to 80% - deploys obfuscation tricks to try and disguise the words, and slip them past anti-spam software at the email gateway. These tricks can be as simple as deliberately misspelling a word, or using a zero instead of the letter "o", to much more sophisticated techniques that exploit the power of HTML email. However, sophisticated anti-spam software can detect spam which contains deliberately obfuscated words and phrases and prevent it from reaching users' inboxes. For instance, Sophos PureMessage can detect more than 5,600,000,000 different ways in which the word "Viagra" can be obfuscated in a spam email. SophosLabs analysed a list of words based on the level of frequency with which they were used in spam email to determine which words were most commonly obfuscated. SophosLabs estimates that over 30% of the spam it received contained URLs relating to healthcare advertisements, such as drug offers, while over 20% of URLs received had offensive content within the message, indeed sexually explicit words make up 14% of the top 50 words on the list. "The list of words most commonly hidden by the spammers from anti-spam software reveals that most spam is about the old favourites: drugs, money and sex," continued Cluley. "It is not only essential that people keep their anti-spam software up-to-date, but that they resist the temptation to buy products sold via spam emails. Spammers are criminals, plain and simple. If no-one responded to junk email, and didn't buy products sold in this way, then spam would be as extinct as the dinosaurs." NOTE: Information contained in this report may be considered offensive by some customers. The top 25 words most commonly obfuscated in spam emails:
Source - Sophos (Sophos report reveals words that spammers most commonly try to disguise)
Sample Impotence Spam - Cialis A typical spam promoting impotence drugs such as Viagra and the more recent Cialis. Common variations are weight loss, penis enlargement, human growth hormones and other illicit drugs. These types of spam usually links to just as unreputable websites, claiming to be in business for many years and with bogus testimonials of satisfied customers. Placing an order will either lead to a credit card scam or in the rare case when the product is delivered, but guaranteed to invite more spam. These websites are mass produced using templates and registered shortly before the spam is sent. In a short while, the website will be blacklisted by every known community, including Google. Having served its purpose, the spammer then moves on and registers another website. In the interest of originality, the body of the message is left unaltered as much as possible. But for security reasons, and to protect the reputation of our own website from being seen as linking to bogus websites, the links in the spam message have been disabled. Placing your mouse over them will show the original url it intended to link to, but clicking on them will bring you to spamhaus.org, a non-profit organization for combating spam.
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