Spam filters have become so adept at filtering out email offers of smut, performance-enhancing pharmaceuticals and hoards of Nigerian cash that spammers are having to become ever more inventive. Spelling the name of Pfizer's blue pill "\/1/\GR/\" is no longer enough. As BoingBoing reports, the Ascii-art techniques that once let a generation of text-adventure programmers squeeze a picture of a Middle-Earth into a fraction of a kilobyte are now being employed to slip questionable messages past the automated email border-guards. No doubt virus writers will soon follow suit, Sneak feels, and rather than sending their malware as an easily-detectable compiled binary, will take a tip from the old days of computer magazine program distribution. Look forward to attacks that start: "You've won a prize! To claim, simply open a new file in Notepad, save it as winner.exe, and then paste in the following winner's code (it's four pages long for security reasons): 023AD356FF045BDAA4958739..." etc. etc. You have been warned.

03 Dec 2004