Cyrillic Spam

June 4, 2005

We have some fairly advanced spam filtering at TMC but I am always cautious with spam, erring on the side of checking everything and not letting anything get deleted without checking it at least once. From time to time I miss an important message but I am getting a total of 1,000 messages a day when you sum it all up so checking this mess is time consuming. We have the option to delete items marked as spam and I don't do this unless the sender is on a blacklist. Blacklists are centrally maintained and this system is pretty accurate. Every now and then a real message gets flagged as spam.

Anyway, I wanted to share a tip. One of our spam filters -- yes we have a few on the server and locally, on each machine -- changes the subject line to tell you why the message is marked as spam. I have been noticing more and more Cyrillic spam and the subject of all these messages now have the word Cyrillic in them. I just made a rule that takes these messages and deletes them. Spam has been reduced a great deal.

I still check the deleted folder (I have to permanently delete something for it to go away) from time to time but out of a few thousand Cyrillic messages, not one of them has been legitimate so far. The same can be done will characters in other languages. Good luck and happy spam hunting.

Cyrillic Spam

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Cyrillic Spam