Weird spam

[it290]

Right, well, very little spam manages to get through my filter, but I've been getting similar ones consistently for a while now. The title is always something like this:

"Gòod work CIAíS VìAGRRA"

But the weirdest thing is that the text never has anything to do with viagra, or anything of the sort. Today's was the wackiest I've seen in a while:

And the seated man will go on talking: and began scooting about among the adults on a tiny two-wheeler furnished offered her face to the wind and thought with a certain sadness about the window at night, nor any Varenukha, but had simply felt bad and in a state chairs, one foot shod in an old, worn-out shoe, the other in a shiny new That is impolite, Nikolai Ivanovich! Im still a woman after all! Its White Sea. They were of especially terrible renown during the thirties. The great city - vanished as if it had never existed in the world... Yes, apartment no.50 was acting up, and it was impossible to do anything Midnight was approaching; they had to hurry. Margarita dimly perceived despair and wrath. He shouted about having committed no crime, and about bared his chest, which had been hurt by the spear and down which ran dirty That evening the professor had few patients, and as twilight approached checkered one made his own introductions to the fin-director, calling of a profession similar to yours, I have had dealings with only one them down! The giant Rat-slayer is trapped! He raised his voice, cracked

I thought, hmm, that sounds familar, and indeed, it's an excerpt from 'The Master and Margarita'. Now, the question I'm asking is this - why are spammers sending me pieces of classic Russian literature? I can only assume it's the work of some botnet/worm, but there's no link or attachment in the email, so what's the point? Anyone know anything about this? Spam often has a surreal quality, but this is the weirdest I've seen.

 

[Mask of Destiny]

It's an attempt to get pass spam filters. I've seen one that takes little bits and pieces of different literature and stitches it together with interesting results.

 

[it290]

Right, but what's the point if there's no ad/malware attached?

 

[lordofduct]

Never read "Master and Margarita", but the book seems to be poorly translated.

Anyways... they are probably just testing their borders. See what things make it through and what doesn't so that way they can find ways to get SPAM through and sell the information or something. Possibly it is a Russian novel they used at it is common in Russia and that is probably where the solicited letter came from (often they are... not saying it as fact though).

It's like kicking your dog into the electric fence to test if its on before actually climbing it. Well thats what I used to do anyways... ever grab an electric fence when not expecting it? IT FREAKIN' HURTS!

[ADD] And do NOT get me started on peeing... ohhhh does that tingle. We used to play that as a game. Who could do it the longest. It flipped us out when we heard the Ren and Stimpy song as we had been playing it for years already... maybe the creators drove by one day or something and saw us.

 

[it290]

Well, actually, after looking at the spam, it's kind of cut-up. It's not the fault of the translation, they just took random parts of the novel and spliced them together. Good book though. As for it being a Russian book, I think it's probably just because it's an old book, and so is no longer under copyright --- I'm sure there are multiple full-text versions of it on the web.

About the testing theory, that sounds plausible, but still, why not test with the payload attached?

 

[antime]

Have you looked at the raw email? Some clients will filter out everything that's not pure text or looks spam-ish, and many spams are just one image link or inline image with some filter-breaking text attached.

 

[it290]

Yeah, there's nothing in the raw email either, although it is listed as multipart (but with no attachments). Maybe there was one at one point and it got stripped out along the way somewhere (by my ISP perhaps)... I dunno.

 

[Mask of Destiny]

It's possible it had a virus attached when originally sent, but it got stripped off by some server along the way. Though usually the server that does the virus stripping adds some text to the top of the message to say it did so.

 

[joe81]

one time i got a message from what said to be my prof(he was a gov spy lol) and i opened it and it had nothing in it. so i went to look at it's properties or what ever you know to see the header. and instead of having any header information it just had either the bill of rights or the declairation of independence in it i forget what one. now that was a strangest spam i ever got. lol i emailed my teacher while drunk and freaked out by it and was like what are you doing sending me a virus. he was like "i dont know what the fuck you're talking about".