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

more elaborate

[Anonymous Coward]

Once in a few minutes, there was a first post.

Re:SPAM is not different from the rest of publicit

[datadriven]

Try to live an hour online whithout listening about micro$oft. It's just not possible.

Especially if you spend that hour on slashdot.

Overview of Spam Filtering Approaches

[Anonymous Coward]

I have written pretty extensively about how spam can be prevented and proposed a spam filter based on naive Bayesian spam filtering.

Check it out here: http://www.patrick-ansari.org/blog/
http://www.patrick-ansari.org/blog/2005/03/bayesia n-spam-filtering.html

I conclude that the only truly effective way to stop spam is to make it more expensive for spam to be sent. A payment systems whereby a $0.01 per message is charged would eradicate spam in my opinion.