Lee Semel

Captcha Spam

I got my first ‘captcha spam’ yesterday! It consisted of a single graphic containing a paragraph of jittery, contorted text on a patterned background.

Captcha Spam

They must be trying bypass any spam filters that use OCR on images included in emails (I didn’t know there were spam filters that do this, but apparently there are!) There’s also been a report of the first ASCII Art spam. Spam techniques just keeps getting weirder and weirder!

2 Responses to “Captcha Spam”

  1. Andrew Parker Says:

    Wow, Captcha spam. Very Cool! My email reader won’t display images by default (like most email readers) so I can’t imagine that this method is too effective.

    ~Andrew

  2. Lee Says:

    I imagine these will just become crazier if spam filters start OCRing the graphics that come with emails… soon we’ll be getting spam that looks abstract art.

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