Poetry Spam?*
Some time in mid-February, I got tired of my spam filter’s many false positives and decided to turn it off. I preferred having to sift through 10-20 spam emails by hand than risk missing an important email falsely flagged and blocked. An additional bonus was the entertainment value of new and novel spam. Over the last month or two, I noticed a large amount of weird spam (as in not like your average spam, since all spam is pretty weird). This phenomenon peaked around two weeks ago, when I was receiving upwards of 5-10 of them a day.
Each email consisted of a subject, and when appeared to be a couplet of 19th-century-poetry sounding text. Some examples included:
Subject: and said, as her tear drops back she forced,
and, though i should say it never,
the trees bring forth sweet ecstasy only for the sake of present ease or gratification?
Subject: launched on yon shining bay,–
the latest spawn the press hath cast,–
father, father, where are you going look on the rising sun: there god does live
Subject: thy summer’s play younger and younger every day;
darkness passes away then cherish pity; lest you drive an angel from
answer’d the lovely maid and said; i am a watry weed, this time last evening. right there! all aboard!”
And that was it! No link to porn, no methods to please my man in bed, no pills to grow myself a 4 foot penis.
I think Scott put it best.
Subject: Re: the sky-lark and thrush,
From: Scott Smith
…the fuck?On Sat, Jun 27, 2009 at 1:15 AM, Nathan Harrison
wrote:> he doth give his joy to all. sits and smiles on the night.
> become a garden mild. the miner pauses in his rugged labor,
Incidentally, that one is my favorite, for some reason. It almost makes sense.
In the name of science, I did a little snooping regarding the emails. First, I checked the originating IP addresses from the email headers. I looked at maybe a dozen emails and traced the originating countries to see if they came from any one place. They came from a variety of countries, including Uruguay, Kuwait, Germany, Italy, and even Urbana, Ohio. Was this a semi-sentient global botnet determined to demonstrate its Vogon-esque poetry skills to the world?
The next question then is, were these couplets originally composed or plagarized from some famous poems? I pulled up Google and searched for some of the more coherent sounding phrases, and indeed several of them were hits. It appeared that this botnet was channeling the works of William Blake and Bret Harte to create its poetic genius.
So what’s going on? My guess is probably some variant on standard Bayesian poisoning, to try to confuse spam checkers. According to the wikipedia article on email spam, a common technique for Bayesian poisoning involves taking text from Project Gutenberg, and suspiciously, both Blake and Harte are in there.
However, Bayesian poisoning is used for text that goes along with spam trying to sell things, not random text by itself. Meh, whatever. Over the course of the last week, these emails have slowed, and I haven’t seen one in a couple days. All I get now are my normal “How to Have rGeat sex – Smash alll Records www. bu15. net. Bewitcheed, Bedazzled, uBsted” emails. Perhaps this will forever become a mystery.
Hey, maybe this is Conficker finally doing something interesting
* Note: Not to be confused with spam poetry or “spoetry”, another interesting phenomenon where people make poems out of spam subject lines. Seriously.