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

Murder is the answer to everything

[RotJ]

If the people who click on and buy things through spam--and therefore making spam a profitable business--were all horrifically murdered somehow, that would solve the entire problem without the need of any of this technological muckery. The only technology you would need to develop is be some kind of device that can murder people cheaply and efficiently.

Re:I have an idea

[ChuckSchwab]

What's the point of your idea? To stop spam? If so, I don't see the point. 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.

Microsft falls short... again

[lpenz]

As an evil company, they probably spam better than filter.

Re:The Microsoft way

[Gentlewhisper]

Wow. I'm impressed. You even managed to balance the parentheses while doing the face-to-keyboard routine.

If you are a Windows developer you would have long gotten used to it by now...

How many spammers spam direct from their own boxes

[aug24]

Don't put fucking windows boxes on networks! If spam wasn't sent via zombies, the real-time blocking list would make all this go away (the tinfoil hat wearers amongst us could make their own lists).

It's only because crappy microsoft machines can be used to obfuscate the source of the mails that they can do send this many mails without being barred.

IT'S FUCKING MICROSOFT'S FAULT FOR PROVIDING MILLIONS OF FREE PROXIES!

J.
PS I'd have put a question mark on the title if /. didn't have such a damn silly length limit for subjects!