[extropy-chat] codes in scam letters

[Mike Lorrey]

You wouldn't even need to misspell. Such misspellings may be a weakness
and indicate hand encryption and poor stegotext. The use of screens
would be possible (assuming your destination printer formatted the
letter to the same scale, margins, etc) or simply a key the receiver
got when in training (sequence of numbers indicating space between
cipertext letters in stegotext) would be more reliable. Such a key
could simply be the receivers name in ascii values, for easy
remembering, leaving the burden on the enemy to know the receivers name
(leaving the possibility of brute forcing with a database of all
possible names).

--- spike <spike66 at comcast.net> wrote:

> 
> 
> After all this time, I am *still* getting scam letters,
> the ones that go something like: Greetings sir or madam,
> I have heard from numerous sources that you are an honest
> man or woman, so please give me your bank account number
> and name, that I may give you 38 billion dollars stolen
> from nygerian communist insurgents, etc.
> 
> (I actually got one that misspelled the country it was
> from.  {8^D  )
> 
> Of course, no one old enough to actually have a bank
> account is falling for those gags anymore, but it 
> occurred to me that they would be the perfect vehicle
> for broadcasting coded messages to sleeper cells or other
> criminal gangs.  No one actually reads very far past
> any email that starts with the word "greetings" so
> this might be just the thing.  They could even hide
> a message in misspelled words, so that a copy-
> paste into microsloth word would underline in red
> squigglies the actual message.
> 
> Harvey and other security wonks, has this been done?
> 
> spike
> 
>   
> 
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> 


Mike Lorrey
Vice-Chair, 2nd District, Libertarian Party of NH
Founder, Constitution Park Foundation:
http://constitutionpark.blogspot.com
Personal/political blog: http://intlib.blogspot.com


		
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