That old saw about the early bird apparently applies to catching spammers as well as other varieties of worm.
Last week we learned of a new technique in the spammer’s repertoire — using animated .GIF files to bamboozle optical character recognition (OCR) software — that was first flagged by Nick FitzGerald, whose day job is chasing malware and virus writers but who maintains a hobby of sorts sniffing out “interesting spam.”
FitzGerald tells me in an e-mail that he is perfectly situated to make such a catch:
“I just happen to be in a chronometrically advantaged position (New Zealand is in DST at the moment, so +1300). This means that when many spammers fire off their next spam run so the fresh spam is ready and waiting in the inboxes of central and western northern hemisphere folk (i.e. basically Europe and North America — the world’s “wealth center” and I’m sure core target of most stuff heavily spamvertized) when they get up in the morning/come into the office, I see it in the middle of my work day before many in the primary target locations are up and about. And having kept a UK e-mail address probably helps in that I get targeted for the bulk of the spam intended for that market. Unsurprisingly, I get tons of UK, German and U.S.-oriented phishing spam, but almost no New Zealand and Australian phishing spam.
FitzGerald also sees his day job and his hobby gaining more in common with each other.
“My interest in spam is peripheral to my anti-malware/antivirus work, though the AM/AV and spam fields are pulling together as the spammers depend more and more on traditional malware techniques for better protecting their operations and thus business model,” he says.
