Avira warns: New spam wave with anti OCR techniques

Fri, 17 November 2006

Avira warns: New spam wave with anti OCR techniques

Tettnang, 17 November 2006 – An uncommon “Pump and Dump” spam wave hit users’ inboxes in the last couple of days. The spammers worked harder to make the messages impossible to be analyzed by the filters that use OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technologies. They no longer use the old scrambling techniques with lines and dots but a completely new approach: random colored shapes as background and text written in waves. Moreover, the size of the images is different and the texts have different paragraph formats written in different colors and fonts.

“Pump and Dump” is an ever expanding spam type consisting in fake advertisements about cheap stocks which are supposed to increase from 50% up to 1000% in a couple of days. No need to say that the advertisements are fake and that they try to artificially grow the value of the actions in order to obtain profit or to launder money.

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