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 Arms Race Goes On

[DumbSwede]

Just today I saw a new method in a ebay.com phishing scheme.

The ebay.com link showed up at the bottom of the browser, but was replaced with some kind of javascript mouseon event. This is probably not new.

Instead of random text to fool Bayesian filters, it had hidden recent news article summaries (bracketed by html comment tags) that would be similar to what you might post to a friend.

Spam filters will probably be upgraded to catch this soon, but it was the first time I had seen it. And of course as mentioned in the article, the ebay specifics where obfuscated by html tags between letters.

Slashdot typos strick again!

[VeryProfessional]

I thought the name David Hackerman was a bit too good to be true, and it turns out it was. Following the link shows that his name is David Heckerman . Note to /. eds: please proofread your posts. It's not like they're very long...