SPUTR
Trick naming
Each trick in the Spammers' Compendium has a
friendly name (which is intended to be humourous), and also a SPUTR name. SPUTR
(Spam/Phish Uniform Trick Repository) is a naming scheme
for spammer and phisher content tricks that was first proposed by John Graham-Cumming. More details
can be found here.
Each name consists of three '!'-separated parts: a purpose, a name, and a technology.
- The purpose is the reason for the trick (for example, the trick is used to
obscure a URL, or to insert innocent words).
- The name is derived from the current pejorative name.
- The technology identifies the way in which the trick is coded (for example, with
HTML or MIME).
Purposes
The following table contains a list of 'purposes' that can be used to categorize
tricks.
| BWO |
Bad word obfuscation |
Making it hard for a filter to parse potentially bad words (e.g. Viagra) |
| GW |
Good word insertion |
Adding words likely to confuse a statistical filter. |
| HB |
Hash busting |
Inserting randomness designed to make message hashing hard. |
| TA |
Tokenization avoidance |
Preventing a filter from tokenizing a message. |
| UH |
URL hiding |
Hiding a URL so that a user is fooled into clicking an incorrect link. |
| UO |
URL obfuscation |
Making it hard for a filter to identify a URL and check it against a black list. |
| WB |
Web bugs |
Inserting a beacon that tells the spammer that a message has been read. |
Technologies
For a single name there could be multiple tricks using different technologies
(e.g. some tricks might be implemented using HTML or CSS), or tricks that are
intended for different purposes (words might be inserted to fool a Bayesian filter or to
break a hash).
This table shows the 'technologies' that are recognized in the naming scheme:
| CSS |
Use of CSS |
| HTML |
Any HTML without using CSS |
| Javascript |
Use of Javascript for trickery |
| MIME |
Manipulation of MIME |
| PDF |
Use of PDF files |
| Plain |
Plain text |
| Image |
Images (GIF, JPG or PNG) |
| Flash |
Macromedia Flash |
| Audio |
Any audio file format |
| Office |
Any office file format |
