Re: What is this email trying to do?

On 17 Mar, 19:53, ibupro...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Moe Trin) wrote:
On Mon, 17 Mar 2008, in the Usenet newsgroup comp.os.linux.security, in article

<ni62b5-npa....@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Doug Laidlaw wrote:
Just got the same thing again.  3x &#00119;, which could be www. but
119 doesn't appear in the ASCII table at all, and the next ones are
&#46;&#108; "&" + another nonexistent one.  The complete line runs
off the page.  No wonder I couldn't put them in a Web page and get
any sense out of them.

Have you tried using 'decimal' rather than octal or hex?

&#00119 -> w
&#46    -> .
&#108   -> l

That's an old spammer's trick for obfuscation of addresses and URLs.
The leading '&#' tells some browsers that this character is shown in
decimal.  I'm not sure, but I think it's merely using an 8 bit (or
multi-byte) character set instead of ASCII. I think it's a feature of
the browsers most idiots use to read their mail. If you look at the
man pages for the other character sets

It sounds like you're seeing the spam aimed at Outlook and other
clients that automagically transform such debris into URL's. I'm also
seeing a lot of Unicode, foreign language spew lately, so it could be
in a language you're not set up to display. Spammers will try
*anything*, so it's hard to guess which it is without a copy of the
spew.
.

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