This morning I saw a news article about subliminal spam messages on ZDNet. I was intrigued to read about it because a few days ago Nick FitzGerald wrote to me with an example spam that he dubbed 'subliminal'. I wrote back and told him I was going to blog about it and he said go ahead.The blog post is Subliminal advertising in spam? and was posted on Monday, September 4, 2006. That same day Slashdot picked up my blog post here . Later it was also picked up by Digg.So I was a little surprised that the ZDNet article didn't mention Nick, me, my blog, Slashdot, or Digg. In fact, the article contains a link to Panda's press release on the subject: PandaLabs detects a new spam technique in which they state "PandaLabs has detected a spam message that uses subliminal advertising techniques.". No mention of this blog anywhere there either, but there are two images of such a spam, both of which I believe were lifted directly from my blog without attribution. The press release is dated the day after my post/Slashdot headline: Tuesday, September 5, 2006.Here are the images side by side for comparisonImage from my blog postImage from Panda's press release ( local archive of the image)And I named my imagewhen I extracted it from the spam, and Panda named the same image. The MD5 checksum of my image isand the Panda image has the checksum. And I also thought the original was a bit large for my blog so I reduced it from 603x451 to 302x226, the Panda image has the same reduced dimension. Hmm. Exactly the same image.The other image in the press release is also, I believe, from my blog:Image from my blog postImage from Panda's press release ( local archive of the image)Once again, I named my imagewhen I extracted it from the spam, and Panda named the same image. The MD5 checksum of my image isand the Panda image has the checksum. Again I thought the original was a bit large for my blog so I reduced it from 603x451 to 302x226, the Panda image has the same reduced dimension. Hmm. Exactly the same image, again.So it looks a lot to me like Panda heard about my blog post (perhaps through Slashdot) and then passed Nick's example off as their own research. Of course, it's possible that Panda the day after my blog post, independently found the same thing, named it subliminal spam, named the frames within the gif the same thing as me, extracted them from exactly the same spam image (which they managed to capture even though spammers are adding random noise so that hashing is impossible) and issued their press release.On Wednesday, September 6, 2006 (two days after my blog post/Slashdot headline) Sophos put out a press release Spammers use subliminal messages in latest pump-and-dump scams in which they state: "Experts at SophosLabs™, Sophos's global network of virus, spyware and spam analysis centers, have identified a "pump-and-dump" stock spam campaign which uses an animated graphic to display a "subliminal" message to potential investors."Once again the release doesn't mention me, Nick, this blog, Slashdot, Digg, ... It too includes an image that appears to be from the same spam campaign I was blogging about (a pump and dump for the stock TMXO), but there's no image borrowing here. The image is from the same campaign but different, and they no doubt didn't borrow any images from me.Clearly, Sophos could have seen the same spam campaign as Nick and I and come to the same conclusion and called it 'subliminal' spam.On Thursday, September 7, 2006 it appears that SoftScan got into the game too. They are mentioned in this article where it's written: "SoftScan's analysis of the latest pump-and-dump scam has discovered that an image appears for a split second every so often in the email with the word 'buy' repeated several times."Disclaimer: I can't prove that any of these companies saw my blog post on Slashdot and then issued press releases, but the timing is interesting: my blog post comes first followed by press releases and articles using either the same image, the same campaign and all calling it 'subliminal spam'. Perhaps 'subliminal' spam was an obvious name, and I'm crazy, but...An offer: on the other hand, if any company would like free reign to pass off things on my blog as their own work I have a simple offer for you: give me a small stock option in your company, call me a 'technical advisor' or similar, and feel free to take what you want from here.: SoftScan's Corporate Communications Manager Bo Engelbrechtsen comments below (see comments section) that they independently found this, and had never heard of this blog before.: In a private email a Sophos employee I know well says: "I personally alerted Sophos's PR team about this spammer trick [...] The word "subliminal" was the first thing that came to my mind when I saw it. [...] I don't read John's blog and am very disappointed with this insinuation. We receive millions of spam e-mails to our traps every day, many of which get analyzed and looked at by spam analysts around the world. We don't need to steal someone else's story..."

Labels: anti-spam