OT: pdf spam

Martin.Hepworth martinh at solidstatelogic.com
Tue Jun 26 15:48:25 IST 2007


Just had another one come in and DCC flagged that....

--
Martin Hepworth
Snr Systems Administrator
Solid State Logic
Tel: +44 (0)1865 842300

> -----Original Message-----
> From: mailscanner-bounces at lists.mailscanner.info [mailto:mailscanner-
> bounces at lists.mailscanner.info] On Behalf Of Gareth
> Sent: 26 June 2007 12:27
> To: MailScanner discussion
> Subject: Re: OT: pdf spam
>
> 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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