Next Generation Spam Zombies Will Use Data Mining

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."

Comments

Well poisoners...

[mengel]

These are attempts to poison word-based beysian(sp?) spam filters.

If you mark enough of these random collection of useful word messages as spam, your beysian spam filer will start filing real, useful email as spam, and you will eventually decide the filter doesn't work and turn it off...

Of course, if you feed your filter just the headers and stuff that actually looks like spam, and not the blocks of random words, it can still learn useful things.