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Next Generation Spam Zombies Will Use Data Mining

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the hate-these-new-fast-zombies dept.

branewashd writes "The Globe and Mail is covering some new research on the future of spam. The paper 'Spam Zombies from Outer Space', from researchers at the University of Calgary, will be presented on Sunday at the European Institute for Computer Anti-Virus Research conference. According to the paper, the next generation of spam zombies will employ 'sophisticated data mining of their victims saved email'. When a computer is turned into a spam zombie, it will first be mined of its address book, mail client configuration, and mail archives. Then the spam program will use Natural Language Processing techniques to send spam messages to the victim's contacts that look a lot like messages that the user has previously sent. The researchers predict that this will be extremely hard to detect, but they do offer a few suggestions for combating it."

1 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. From a practical standpoint... by Null+Nihils · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    As much as I would like to see everyone drop all the Windows, Outlook, Internet Explorer crap so we can all move on from things such as spam and worms, I doubt that this is going to happen to any good degree in the next 5 years. But who knows?

    What I'm sure will happen, sadly, is that Microsoft will push Vista, and it will contain some half-assed attempts at curbing these horrible, large-scale problems of zombies, worms, etc, etc. How effective these attempts will be (if at all) remains to be seen.

    So, the next 5 years will be... interesting. Will Vista do anything to curb the problems which are likely to be exacerbating as described in TFA? (Doubtful.) Will less stupid technologies like Linux and OSX start moving in to actually do something about the sorry state of things? (Also doubtful.)

    On the bright side, what I can see in the next 5 years or so, is the older PC's that are sitting in a den somewhere pumping out viruses and spam, dying off as their cheap Dell consumer-grade components go kaput. What these zombie computers are replaced with is what will make the difference. We can always cross our fingers and hope that these computers will be replaced with Linux or OSX. And hope, and hope.

    At any rate, I for one do not welcome our outer space spam zombie overlords.