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meerkt
Gerbil Jedi
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Funny HTML attributes in phishing email

Sun Mar 25, 2018 7:52 am

For some reason I decided to view the source of a spam/phishing email. I found a whole bunch of nonsensical HTML attributes in otherwise functional tags. The attributes were all English words, the values either a number or another English word.

I can think of no reason for them to be there.
Last edited by meerkt on Sun Mar 25, 2018 10:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.
 
TwistedKestrel
Gerbil Elite
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Re: Funny HTML attributes in phishing email

Sun Mar 25, 2018 8:06 am

Could you post the source to pastebin or something? I'm kinda curious now
 
meerkt
Gerbil Jedi
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Re: Funny HTML attributes in phishing email

Sun Mar 25, 2018 8:48 am

It was under Spam and I deleted it so it's really gone.
Stuff similar to <table fog=49 ...> or <span hopscotch="whatever" ...>
 
NovusBogus
Graphmaster Gerbil
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Re: Funny HTML attributes in phishing email

Sun Mar 25, 2018 1:46 pm

Maybe hoping that if HTML doesn't look as much like HTML, it'll have a better chance of passing a spam filter?
 
meerkt
Gerbil Jedi
Topic Author
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Re: Funny HTML attributes in phishing email

Sun Mar 25, 2018 4:02 pm

If anything, you'd expect strange text to be more likely to get flagged? But it is valid HTML.
 
ludi
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Re: Funny HTML attributes in phishing email

Sun Mar 25, 2018 9:18 pm

Probably randomly generated (both the number of tags and their contents) in a crude attempt to pad out the effective document length, and fool any spam checker that archives known spam message formats and then checks incoming mail for similarities.
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