Damn Spammers!

Tom Keating : VoIP & Gadgets Blog
Tom Keating
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Damn Spammers!

Spammer or Innocent Victim?

Spammer or Innocent Victim?

I loathe spammers - they're below lawyers and tax collectors. Spammers are lower than 20,000 Leagues Beneath the Sea... lower the depths of hell... lower than the lowest cheap shot ever thrown. So what exactly have spammers done lately to draw my ire? Well, now they are sending spam with photos of attractive women embedded within the email to try and get you to open the attachment (usually a virus). The screenshot of the email in this blog entry is one such photo that I get at least 5 times a day for the past several months with the same exact woman's photo. The attachment is usually a .com file and it's always a virus.

Here's the source code for the one I got today... (Note the "cid:image12.jpeg" part.)

Hi<!--Tkeating-->,<br>
<br>

<img src="cid:image12.jpeg"><br>
I just want to talk with someone...<br><br>

For  more  information see the attached file.<br>
<br>
Have  a good day, Lizie<br>

 

Apparently, even though I block images in my Microsoft Outlook client, by using the "cid" tag with an image copy/pasted into an email spammers can bypass the "image blocking" feature of Outlook. I'm surprised Microsoft hasn't caught that "bug" yet. Then again I'm not surprised. Well, at least the image doesn't report back to spammers that you opened the email - the image is embedded within the email itself and is not hosted on a web server somewhere - a technique often used to track if you read a spam message.

Well, I hope I've done some good by showing her photo on my blog. Hopefully visitors of my blog will recognize her photo and realize not to open the attachment. I just hope she's not an innocent victim of the spammers using her photo without her permission for personal gain. That would indeed be a new low.

Let me know if you've seen her photo in any of your spam by posting in the Comments. I'd be curious how widespread her photo has gotten.



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