Decrypt this SPAM message

General Questions
#1

Anyone got any ideas what this message is?



dmdabdblcj 
fjcebhdkcse mavwfhdknlpt rshsncdpant dikkikcceoytsd nxzruictqi 
dxmkwlkdewvybd hjbkqhbgsqox 
ltljaucmte pxharfbjfaihm nsyebhcflcrcrb enkbkobbhsy zqrwiffsfbpjnn osnjxncjftpvjc ymoavudvetx 
hsnifsbpranhfb qzmphqcvawqc qymenecwsheai 
zapopxboxda nbvgiecanu 
lbncggcnaabcl tfavujebnz 
mmpjtccvwifa fyrasocakqaiyb vssuegmpsu 
neohnsdmcqltu qxfaxzbywwoixd cnyxgqcaie tfxyepcaema uphglcftmsjg txrapuddtq bsdanubybnbio oadghbxcmz

Some observations:

Looking at the letter frequencies (surprisingly evenly spread) I can’t believe that it is “human random” (i.e. it’s NOT random typing).

I don’t have the tools to do digraph frequency analysis, but a bit of pen and paper stuff made me think it isn’t “computer” random either.

Most confusing is the variable length “codewords”.

#2

Give the lack of short words (4-letters or below), I don’t think it’s a meaningful message. Unless, the whitespace location is itself coded.

#3

random stuff generated to fool spam filters

#4

Why would a spammer be sending you a secret message? :slight_smile: You are the only one that can read it.

It means nothing. It is random. The regular spacing is in order to make it superficially appear to spam-trap software like words. It’s random so that each spam email appears to be unique, and hence not like spam. It’s not real words at random because that would confuse the reader even more than random gibberish.

You are making the mistake of ;

A/ Opening spam
B/ Reading spam
C/ Expecting to see anything but lies within spam.

#5

It looks like just random strings.

One thing I tried was incrementing the letters (so a becomes b, b becomes c etc) by all possible intervals. It didn’t make it any more or less readable.

#6

Not guilty on all charges – someone else asked me, and my first thought was random bolleaux, but I allowed myself to be fooled for a while that each codeword was 12 characters long (in a fixed-width font it is obviously not so). I removed the artifactual spaces and did some frequency counts – the results didn’t “look” like either random-typing or computer-random generated.

Only when I came to post the original text here did I realise that the “codewords” were of variable length, which I admit makes it look like anti-spam-filter nonsense.

#7

Is it send from a hushmail account?

#8

I’m pretty sure not, and it doesn’t look like any PGP-encryption I’ve ever seen.

#9

What do you mean by “computer-random”? There are a great many methods a computer could use to generate random strings, and I’m sure you could generate one to match any set of detectable criteria. And for that matter, what statistics does one look for to recognize “human-random”?

#10

This almost certainly it. It’s likely an attempt to get by Bayesian filtering.

#11

Generating a small number of such strings with a uniform probability distribution (using something like BASIC’s int(RND*26)) would generate seemingly pretty good non-redundant strings. (Of course (and as you said), one could easily write a program to generate random strings to match any criteria, but why bother (unless it’s second order anti-anti-spam strategy))?

Human beings are notoriously lousy at “generating” random strings, and you’d expect a great deal of redundancy there.

This data (at a glance, I’ve not had time to look at it really deeply), seemed to sit somewhere between those two “extremes” of redundancy, not lots, but then, not none.

I’m happy to accept it’s anti-spam-filter gumf.

#12

It’s certainly not a letter for letter substitution cryptogram. The letters of the alphabet are almost evenly distributed in the ‘code,’ which is not how the letters of the alphabet are distributed in common writing.

Also, look at the double letters, there are 11 of them. Not one of them repeated. That’s just odd for standard prose.

So, unless you have some idea that this really is a coded messages, treat it as spam trying to get around filters looking for certain phrases and words.

Peace.