From owner-freebsd-security Mon Feb 21 1:14:44 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-security@freebsd.org Received: from freefall.freebsd.org (freefall.FreeBSD.ORG [204.216.27.21]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5940437BE17; Mon, 21 Feb 2000 01:14:42 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from kris@FreeBSD.org) Received: from localhost (kris@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.9.3/8.9.2) with ESMTP id BAA97488; Mon, 21 Feb 2000 01:14:42 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from kris@FreeBSD.org) X-Authentication-Warning: freefall.freebsd.org: kris owned process doing -bs Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 01:14:42 -0800 (PST) From: Kris Kennaway To: Richard Martin Cc: freebsd-security@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Strange Spam In-Reply-To: <38B0B487.CB71D7E1@origen.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-security@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org On Sun, 20 Feb 2000, Richard Martin wrote: > Has anyone been seeing spam like this lately? It consists of an > unintelligible sequence of English words. Seems to be just strings of > randomly generated words, but I am wondering if there is something more > sinister going on here. Someone accidentally send us an encoded message? I'm wondering if this was an attempt to saturate Echelon by spamming messages which are likely to trip its detection criteria (someone else noted the right-wing and technical jargon). The (lack of) sentence structure would probably flag it as a false positive (the NSA seem to have some fairly sophisticated language analysis systems working for them from what's available in the open literature), but the originator might not have known how to create plausible english garbage messages. It's certainly very strange. Kris To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-security" in the body of the message