It’s no big revelation to say that spammers and virus writers have been getting increasingly sophisticated about the mechanisms they use to get their ads in front of a set of real, human eyes. It seems, recently, that virus writers are concentrating on improving their background infrastructure to get better metrics and overall success rate.

For instance, it seems the miscreants are getting into the world of data mining. There’ve been a couple examples recently of ways they’ve used different techniques for keeping track of how their botnets are doing. Keep your bots in handy groups for different purposes, and then track them with a nice graphical interface!

Personally, I still have a hard time thinking of these groups as “professional”, in the suit-and-tie sense of the word. But this is so organized it makes me wonder if the people behind these things don’t effectively have Accounting and Marketing departments.
But then, occasionally the spammers take a turn that kinda makes you wonder. Yes, the field of “Pump and Dump” stock spam is getting a bit crowded - maybe something new and different is what’s in order?

Starting last night, there was a new raft of spams using a “technique” which is decidedly odd. Just a single word, spelled out in ASCII art. Are they counting on users to google this strange word just to solve the mystery? Or is the “payload” yet to come?