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ASCII-Art Spam

Published November 17th, 2006 in Tech & VC

ascii-art-spam.gif

I just received my first piece of ASCII-Art spam. It’s an inventive way to bypass spam filters. Perhaps this is an old tactic that never hit my radar before, but this is new to me. Pretty interesting. I am tempted to go to the URL to see what the author is spamming me for, but I don’t want to reward the spam tactic. Has anyone else seen much ASCII-Art spam?

This reminds me of Textmode-Quake, an ASCII-Art rendering of the game Quake that can be played in real-time. This is very old, nothing novel, but if you have not seen it yet, check out some screenshots.

2 Responses to “ASCII-Art Spam”  

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  1. 1 Lee Semel Nov 17th, 2006 at 7:16 pm

    I got my first ‘captcha spam’ yesterday! It consisted of a single graphic containing a paragraph of twisted, contorted text, like a website captcha, containing the spam message. They must be trying bypass any spam filters that use OCR on images included in emails (I didn’t know there were spam filters that do this, but apparently there are!).

  2. 2 candice Nov 20th, 2006 at 6:26 pm

    I remember textmode-quake, that was really cool.

    My current favorite type of spam is something of a take on random word spam, which is taking paragraphs out of postings to tech mailing lists and faqs and stuff. It’s slipping past my filters (and gmail’s) due to being too similar to real mail.

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