Anyone who’s been around the net for a while is probably quite familiar with ASCII. Before color monitors and high end graphics, ASCII was the cool way to embellish emails, newsgroup posts, the opening pages of BBS’s and network login screens. It was simple enough: “#” represented dark pixels and “*” represented light ones. Whole fonts were made from collections of characters. It was fun and very creative.

Now that old school technique is back. This time it’s being used by spammers to get around filters. Here’s what it looks like:

Fortunately it doesn’t have a malicious payload, it’s just plain text. Spammers apparently haven’t figured out how to use their newest tool effectively, and in the long run it may not be such an effective one after all. With the huge variety of fonts available these days, there’s no guarantee their message will arrive looking like anything but a screen full of gibberish. Still, security experts are keeping a watchful eye on this newest kind of spam.