Fruitcake Debutantes Defined by O, And Other Spam Tricks

[question everything]

By PUI-WING TAM
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
May 28, 2004; Page B1

Ray Everett-Church, a spam expert, prides himself on being able to block unsolicited e-mails. But some very wordy spam has been sneaking past his content blockers, knotty messages like "prearrange normally acute painfully pre-glacial avast." "It's a word salad," says Mr. Everett-Church, chief privacy officer of antispam software maker TurnTide Inc., and a director of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail. "It's all part of a growing language game."

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Word-salad spam has become especially problematic in the last year, say antispam software companies. The technique of stringing together gibberish phrases was devised specifically to dodge a sophisticated type of screening technology, known as a Bayesian filter, which gained popularity in early 2003.

Based on a form of statistical analysis attributed to the 18th century cleric Thomas Bayes, the filters sort words into four different groups and assign them scores: words such as "Viagra" and "sex" are considered negative; "the" and "and" are benign; esoteric words like "quintessence" aren't typically tracked by the filter; words such as "nonprofit" are positive. Each word group carries a different weighting that determines an e-mail's overall score. The challenge for spammers is to find the optimal mix of word combinations to garner the most positive score. Verbal hierarchy counts: esoteric and positive words are more effective at offsetting a negative word than ordinary benign words.

To that end, spammers are digging into their dictionaries, sprinkling useless phrases like "ballfield Beaujolais commend dilate jittery brigadier" and "fruit cake debutantes defined by O" throughout their messages. One recent spam hawking a fuel-saving technology included phrases such as "verbose jacobus flak shove." Another, selling Viagra, ended with "diorite, the latter flushed."

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