Microsoft Researchers on Stopping Spam

TheBackBencher writes "Scientific American today has a very interesting article about "Stopping Spam" by Joshua Goodman, David Hackerman and Robert Rounthwaite from Microsoft Research. They talk about different types of spam -- spam with emails, spam on IMs, spamlinks on web pages and image based spam. They mention different techniques for spam filtering mainly fingerprinting matching techniques, n grams model, naive bayesian approach, optical character recognition, challenge/response systems and Human Interacted Proofs (HIP) in a very lucid style. They however do not mention fingerprinting approach of using Nilsimsa Hash to tackle addition of random words by spammers in emails or hypertextus interruptus technique used by spammers of splitting words using HTML comments, pairs of zero width tags, or bogus tags. Also, Spam-Research is reporting the SplitFit Technique that Spammers are using to fool Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard."

Comments

The Microsoft way

[Anonymous Coward]

Creating your own spamming division, use illegal tactics to undercut your spamming competition, put them out of business, then stop spamming.

Re:The Microsoft way

[vwjeff]

They talk about different types of spam -- spam with emails, spam on IMs, spamlinks on web pages and image based spam.

Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam; spam bacon sausage and spam; spam egg spam spam bacon and spam; spam sausage spam spam bacon spam tomato and spam;

(punches self in face face hits keyboardadsfjlk;sjdafkldsajflsdak;fjsad;lfkjas;ldk fjas)

Like the old saying goes....(sorta)

[erick99]

Spam is like porn: hard to define but you know what it when you see it. That can be hard to program I would think. But, who knows.

Re:Like the old saying goes....(sorta)

[datafr0g]

Our offsite spam engine can detect porn by looking at shapes, colours, etc...
It works surprisingly well most of the time, though it did once pick up a photo of a broken PCB as porn due to its detected "posture"

Re:Like the old saying goes....(sorta)

[ramblin billy]

Maybe your engine isn't wrong. Maybe it's just perverted.

billy - hey...that's not sadistic...just kinky

Microsoft Research

[panaceaa]

So, does Microsoft Research plan on combating Spam with a Bob-like approach, or the more refined Clippy approach?

Or are they going to come up with an entirely new file system to combat it, hype it up for every Windows release, but then delay its release a few more years?

Oops, pardon me while I reminisce about all the great advances Microsoft Research has given me :).

Re:Microsoft Research

[Technician]

or the more refined Clippy approach?


Clippy "It looks like you are trying to send a lot of e-mail. Would you like to send the first one to 1lol56@aol.com?"

Clippy "It looks like your return address is incorrect. Would you like me to fix it?

Microsoft Research?

[datafr0g]

Don't you mean, Microsoft Mergers & Acquisitions?

Or perhaps...

[Canberra Bob]

Each year they will announce that This is the Year of No More Spam on the Desktop (of course this never happens).

Or they will invent a brilliant new way to stop spam but as it requires the user to recompile all their OS and apps every 3 days it never gets used.

Or they just tell the end users "Why dont YOU code some anti-spam software?"

Or they produce an anti-spam system but the user must install 3 desktops and window managers, requires a 10,000 line config file that must be written by hand, comes with either missing or misleading documentation depending on the version you download and randomly purges any non-free software from the hard drive.

What's so bad about spam in the first place?

[ChuckSchwab]

I see all this time and money being invested into research to block spam. But we need to rethink our premises: does spam even need to be blocked? Is it actually a problem?

What you call "spam", I call "emails that help me learn about the latest products, websites, and business models". You want less of it? I want MORE of it. "Spam" keeps me informed about the world. And the fact is, consumers LIKE spam. Why do you think spam is profitable? Because people buy the products advertised! Studies show that 3 in 5 people who dislike "spam" have actually bought something online. So frankly, you need to be real careful about how you define "spam" because you could be targeting something you LIKE.