I've been cleaning out my spam folder, and I've spotted a new trend: spam emails that pretend to be bug reports.
They all look like this:
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www.J Random Tasting Domain.com
The domains are random gibberish domains, presumably registered and then dropped as part of a domain tasting scam; all appear to be registered through a Chinese domain name registrar.
That's vaguely interesting, but not the reason why I posted this.
Here's the reason: the subject headings, which are supposedly designed to make you think that they're real bug reports, are embarassingly bad. They're of the form "Bug #number subject", and the subjects are things like this: SAVE, DOT MATRIX PRINTER, PORTABLE COMPUTER, DELETE A FILE, ACTIVE MATRIX SCREEN, WYSIWYG, CONTROL KEY (CTRL), HYPERTEXT, RECOVER, APM, ARTICLE, ANTI-VIRUS SOFTWARE, ERROR MESSAGE, ROOT DIRECTORY etc. etc. (Yes, they're all in all-caps.) Of the 57 I've received, there are exactly four that look as if they could have been sent within the last 10 years ("WEBCRAWLER", "SECURITY (ONLINE)", "ONLINE" and "PHOTO CD"), compared to seven stunningly out of date terms ("DOT MATRIX PRINTER", "PENTIUM", "WINDOWS NT", "PLOTTER", "ARCHIE", "DIP SWITCHES", "VL_BUS OR VESA BUS") and a whole bunch more of generic terms. All in all, it looks like the spammers just took an old, obsolete list of computer terms and plugged them into their botnet.
Surely nobody in their right mind would click on one of these links? (Although that won't necessarily stop spam - while the people behind this series of spams are probably chumps, that doesn't mean the people running the botnets aren't raking it in.)
Still, there is a perverse pleasure in seeing that something genuinely useful that I use at work all the time - Internet-based bug report trackers - is now popular enough that it's become a large enough target for spammers.
