Congratulations: You have selected for the Yeti Hopper M20 Cooler. You have been selected many times. It’s right there, in your inbox.
This email is from Dick’s Sporting Goods. Never mind that it reads as Dicks . sporting goodsminus the apostrophe, or Dicks . sportswearor Dicks . sporting goods. Search for “Dicks” in your Gmail and you will find it. Search for “Dicks” on Twitter and—well, something else might pop up. But then you’ll see them, complaints from people who, like you, keep getting emails from “Dick’s Sporting Goods” about the Yeti Hopper M20. The emails urge recipients to click on the link and claim their prize.
You should not click on any part of this email. The Dick’s Sportswear/ Yeti Hopper Cooler contest is not legal and it does not originate from the sportswear brand. It is a fraud, violationwhich most of us have encountered at some point in our online lives.
But it is a particularly dangerous form of Spam, a tool that has surpassed some of Google’s powerful anti-spam tools for Gmail. Google has admitted that this spam campaign is “particularly aggressive”. A security research firm that has been closely monitoring this latest wave of spam told WIRED that the techniques being used are quite novel and point to a future in which more email spam can get through. the most sophisticated anti-fraud systems.
“We train [machine learning] “The company protects,” said Ryan Kalember, executive vice president of cybersecurity strategy at Proofpoint, a US-based company. “But unfortunately, there are some effective ways to deal with that. What’s happening now is, all the fancy machine learning models don’t see where the ‘bad stuff’ is in the email, due to some clever redirects.”
Freelancers using the Report Spam & Unsubscribe tool in Gmail might think that will put an end to Yeti’s compelling emails; mark an email as spam enough times and it will eventually go away. That didn’t work in this case. Justin Watkins, a popular YouTuber, tweeted in frustration about this back in September, begged Google to refine its filters and sent Yeti Hopper emails as spam after receiving emails for several months in a row. “It’s a cat-and-mouse game,” Watkins told me. “I would mark it as spam and it would go away for a week, then I would get it back two or three times a day.”
According to Kalember, what email spammers are doing now is creating a scheme where the machine learning models “don’t really get to the point where they see bad content in the email”. They are using what he calls the HTML binding technique, which is relatively rare. This is different from the old, outdated ways for scammers to bypass spam filters, which can include rotating the cloud storage service they are using or creating URL redirects, where users Open emails that click on the link and get redirected to some other place on the web before they reach the malicious site. Kalember says the new spam campaign is based on something more interesting. (Assuming you find spam “interesting” and not offensive.)
