My Uncle Eric likes to say that the old ones are the best. Having sat through a festive holiday full of repeats of old sitcoms on the telly, I am pretty confident that as far as comedy is concerned that saying holds precious little water. It also doesn’t apply to IT security, although that’s not stopping a whole bunch of threat repeats being broadcast across the Internet.

Despite what numerous security vendors have been telling anyone who will listen since the start of the year (namely that the spammers have taken Christmas off and spam is right down) the evidence points to them being right back in the swing of things now. Indeed, I’ve written up my very real world experience of fighting off a spam attack at one of my online clients in the first week of January as spam gangs appeared to have cracked the reCAPTCHA verification system protecting vBulletin forums from automated registrations.

But spam has always been with us, and can hardly be called an old threat. Which is where the latest Commtouch Internet Threads Trend Report for Q4 comes in, suggesting that some classic spamming techniques have made a comeback.

Commtouch point to the reappearance of ’small and hidden fonts’ combined with Twitter subject lines, as well as the return of ASCII art spam. One can only assume that this strategy is being employed less in order to try and circumvent spam filtering and more as an attempt to try and circumvent human expectation of what spam looks like.

While the media concentrates, quite rightly, on the posting of malicious apps and rogue links to videos on Facebook, social malware leveraging Twitter trust and the like, some of the more savvy bad guys are looking to sneak in through the side entrance by exploiting previously successful but largely forgotten spamming methods.

At the risk of proving myself wrong, there is one old one which is best remembered and it comes from Hill Street Blues: hey, let’s be careful out there…