Armoring Spam Against Anti-Spam Filters

moggyf points to a BBC article about how spam can be successfully tweaked to slip past current filtering methods, excerpting "To finding out how to beat the filters Mr Graham-Cumming sent himself the same message 10,000 times but to each one added a fixed number of random words. When a message got through he trained an 'evil' filter that helped to tune the perfect collection of additional words." iluvspam adds "It's an interview with POPFile author John Graham-Cumming that summarizes his talk at the recent MIT Spam Conference. You can still listen to the technical details here (choose the Afternoon 1 session, he starts about 75 minutes in)."

Comments

infinite monkeys

[bluelip]

SO the ultimate spam protection mechanism would be an infinite number of monkeys type my list of words to associate w/ spam. :)

Re:infinite monkeys

[AllUsernamesAreGone]

We better watch out for slashdot comments appearing in spam now.. ;)

Re:infinite monkeys

[Jonas the Bold]

You kids and your monkeys

In my day we didn't have monkeys. We had to filter spam by hand. And we liked it!

You kids and your infinite monkeys... Shakespear wouldn't have used monkeys were he alive today. He would have rolled up his sleaves and written hamlet the right way!

Damn kids..

Re:infinite monkeys

[TheDigitalRaven]

Hands? Them're luxury! When I were a lad, hands were summat only posh people had. The rest of us had to make do with paws which hadn't evolved fully yet, and we had to filter all of our spam from each mailbox manually, but we had to go to the mailbox - across a river of lava, mind - to collect each message but couldn't filter it until we got back. We'd sort spam twenty six hours a day, getting up two hours before going to bed, and had to eat cold poison while we were doing it. And we had to pay for the priviledge of being allowed to filter our own!

Re:infinite monkeys

[Theresa1]

cold poison ?! you lucky buggers.

We were so poor we had to eat spam.

Re:infinite monkeys

[Tripster]

Don't know about you but my wife won't let me have one!

Ok fuck it

[tomstdenis]

I will pay 1000$ to anyone who seeks out and beats the living daylights out of a spammer. With as many pics on the web as possible for posterity.

Screw these filters and shit. Start creaming spammers worldwide and they'll think twice about it.

Tom

Re:Ok fuck it

[nigelc]

Ahh, an international terrorist proposing an attack. We should be invading Canada any day now...

Re:Ok fuck it

[AdamD1]

Is that illegal? After all he's not 'threatening' the spammer, he's merely presenting an offer he was pretty sure this guy was asking to receive. And besides: He can certainly "opt-out" at any time by choosing not to spam... ;)

Re:Ok fuck it

[FreeUser]

At a minimum, he would be arrested if he came to the states. However, if someone actually went through with the crime, I'm sure Canada would be willing to extradite him. Canada doesn't want maniacs running around free, anymore than the US does.

That assumes that beating the shit out of a SPAMmer is a "maniacal" act. I would argue that it is a perfectly rational course of action, and indeed a public service.

Canada's Finlandization by the US might compell it to hand the guy over anyway, but certainly not for fear of having maniacs run loose (unless you count our troups poised on their border to enforce US Political Correctness Bush Style abroad). :-)

[ Disclaimer required by Our Surveillence State: the preceding was a joke (c.f. humor). ]

Re:The only way

[junkymailbox]

I dont give out my work address to anyone .. and it's not because i fear spam.. :)

Re:The only way

[Quill_28]

>The only way to protect yourself is to not give out your address. Period.

Ummm.... then what good is it?
Do you just e-mail yourself? :-)

Re:Great

[stevesliva]

Guess which words all tomorrows SPAM will contain...

Touch my wireless Berkshire Marriot?

Headline tone

[Faust7]

Armoring Spam Against Anti-Spam Filters

That description sounds too noble for an activity like this. More appropriate headlines would be Making Spam Slick as Owlshit or Infusing Spam with Satanic Strength.

Re:"and can be combated."

[GMontag]

but how do you combat the spammer?

1. Find spammer

2. Kill spammer

3. Become hero of the interweb

4. Write book from prison

5. ???

6. Profit!

Your question is exactly why the death penalty belongs on the street, not in prison.

Re:Really don't understand it.

[tbmaddux]

Are people actually buying penis enlarging pills and patches, herbal viagra, mortgage refinancing, credit repair kits, or any of that stuff?

Let me take a moment to tell you my sad story. I was in desperate need of penis enlargement, and so I did start ordering those pills. But they proved hard to swallow, and the patches were itchy, and I had an allergic reaction to the herbs in the herbal viagra. Unfortunately, I bought so much of this stuff that I had to refinance my home, and the bank wouldn't approve my loan because of all the penis purchases on my credit cards. So as a desperate last measure, I ordered some credit repair kits, but that didn't work either!

Fortunately, this story has a happy ending! As I wrote this message, some polite people in West Africa contacted me and I think they are going to get me out of this financial mess.