OT: pdf spam

Gareth list-mailscanner at linguaphone.com
Tue Jun 26 12:27:20 IST 2007


On Wed, 2007-06-20 at 15:35, Gareth wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-06-20 at 14:49, Sattler, Tim wrote:
> > Hello,
> > 
> > today we received a lot of penny stock spam with just dummy text and a
> > pdf attachment "<username>_report.pdf". All "spammy" key words are
> > inside the pdf document, so these mails are not marked as spam in the
> > majority of cases. If this becomes fashion, I guess it will require new
> > techniques like regex filtering inside attachments or hash databases for
> > "spammy" documents.  
> 
> I was just about to post about these myself. I have attached an example.
> 
> I have found if I use 'less' to view the document it renders it to plain
> text and is very readable. So would it be possible to convert a pdf to
> plain text and append it to the email message for the purposes of the
> spamassassin checks?
> 
> Alternativly perhaps this is a job for MCP?
> 
> Another possibility would be for the author of fuzzyocr to recognise
> .pdf files and render them so they can be scanned for keywords. I can
> think of a few keyword and load issues this could cause though.

Here is another example of pdf spam. This time they have converted their
normal gif/jpg spam image to a pdf file and sent it.

I have also posted this example to the fuzzyocr mailing list.
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