I've had people sending me listwashing tokens for months, and to date I've only seen 2 which I couldn't get anywhere with. I suspect blowfish or similar is beyond the ability of some of them, they can't use what they can't understand, which is why we're seeing variants on classic ciphers. Think about it, if you were trying to hide information in a message, would a simple shift even get considered?
Someone here recently pointed out that spammers routinely break into other people's machines, and come up with all sorts of creative ways around whatever we try to use to block their garbage. They may be immoral, unethical, pathetic wastes of flesh with no regard for the desires or property of others, but *they are NOT stupid*.
Okay, some of them are stupid -- we see the occasional indication that one or another of them can't even figure out how to use their own ratware (leaving in $RAND strings and such). But if we start considering all of them to be stupid, we'll be underestimating them, which could be a really bad mistake.
Perhaps they're using such simple algorithms simply to save their own CPU power? After all, generating a ROT13 or ROT5 version of each email address in a million-message spam run has got to be less intensive than generating an MD5, Blowfish, or other hash.
--Kai MacTane
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