When spammers use your own e-mails
Some time ago, one of our readers, Mike S, sent an e-mail with an interesting observation about how spammers used e-mails from one of his customers (this has been actually sitting in my own inbox for way too long).
The e-mails contained all "standard" elements such as spoofed headers etc, but there was a very interesting thing with the body content.
As with most e-mail spammers send, these e-mails were HTML as well. However, the interesting part was that the spammers took his clients' e-mails and modified the HTML a bit to include their own message.
The spammers added the link they wanted to spam at the top and then opened a <TITLE> HTML tag. After the TITLE tag came the full original e-mail, but the tag was never actually closed. This resulted in Outlook displaying only the spammed link, but not showing the original e-mail content.
The raw e-mail looked like this:
--AlternativeBoundary.22222222.22222222
Content-Type: text/html; charset="ISO-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
<html><center><FONT SIZE="5" COLOR="#10566D">Spammers message</font><br><br><A HREF="http://spammers link">http://spammers link</A>
<title><body leftmargin=5 topmargin=5 marginwidth=0 marginheight=0>
<table width=100% cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 bgcolor=white align=center border=0>
<tr><td style='{font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; color=#7a929f;font-weight:700;font-size: 11px;text-transform : capitalize;}'>
.... ORIGINAL MAIL CONTENT ...
</td></tr>
</table><p> </p>
</body>
Of course, by using the original e-mail content (which was legitimate when the client sent it), the spammers are trying to evade Bayesian filters, and at least in Mike's example they even managed to get SpamAssassin decrease the final score of the e-mail.
In any case, it's an arms race between spammers and content filter developers. Thanks Mike again for sending this interesting information (and sorry it took so long to analyze it).
--
Bojan
| Web App Penetration Testing and Ethical Hacking | Amsterdam | Mar 31st - Apr 5th 2025 |
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