For most spammers, the solution is a little creative spelling.
Internet security firm Sophos this week published a report detailing words spammers use frequently in emails but purposefully misspell in an attempt to camouflage them from spam-blocking software. Topping the list are Cialis, orgasms and Viagra.
“Spammers have a dilemma,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos. “They want to sell certain products or include certain phrases in their spam emails, but they also know that most people will have filters looking for those words and automatically junking them.”
As a result, Cluley said, the majority of spammers, around 80 percent, use tricks to hide words and slip them past spam-blockers guarding the email gates. These tricks can be as simple as adding a letter to produce “Viagara” or substituting a zero for an “o” to make “0rgasms” possible.
“The list of words most commonly hidden by the spammers from anti-spam software reveals that most spam is about the old favorites: drugs, money and sex,” Cluley said. Of the top 20 words, eight are related to drugs and four to sex.
But software companies have caught on to such techniques and are aggressively adding tools that can detect almost all imaginable permutations and misspellings of common spam words.
For example, Sophos estimates that more than 30 percent of spam contains links to URLs selling pharmaceuticals and 20 percent lead to sites with adult material, so the company programs its own spam-blocking software to detect millions of different ways brand-name drugs and sexual terms can be misspelled.
