Slashdot Mirror
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."
Technical advances Better tricks to fool spam filters, like the examination of text the user has written mentioned in TFA. This is close to impossible to stop, the only way is to try to be faster in developing better anti spam tools. Lack of security Most spam today is send from captured machines, and in the future these machines will not only be used to send but also to improve spam. This could be helped by better educated users, better default system security or easier to understand security configurations. At least there is hope. Response The only reason for all this spam is that it still pays. Even though it is a very small number of people, it is enough to finance the whole illegal business of building bot nets, stealing addresses etc. If there was a way to stop people to buy that stuff, the other two points would be irrelevant. Unfortunately this is not going to happen, which is the most frustrating part.
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Or... the world of 1998? Didn't pretty much all Outlook worms do this?
My work here is dung.
There will be some people who will get pop-ups from the zombie virus requesting that they upgrade their machine to be able to run the virus properly.
That's sure to be a dead giveaway...
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
1. This is Microsoft's fault.. Microsoft should fix their operating system to ask for a password any time a program is installed, registry settings are changed, key files are modified, etc.. Also, 'install on demand' should be eliminated from Internet Explorer. Ever notice how spyware pretty much didn't exist before Microsoft gave the developers complete control over a person's PC? The end user is stupid. The whole premise of Windows assumes that.. So then why did Microsoft decide that the end user should be able to have his system completely compromised with ONE SINGLE GODDAMN FUCKING WRONG CLICK WHEN BROWSING A SHADY SITE?
2. This is the fault of the legal system. Spyware is ALREADY illegal. Congress has talked about making it 'illegaler.' Someone needs to jump forth and realize the moneymaking potential that it is to sue the pants off the incessant spammers.
Again.. 99.9% of spyware problems can be fixed by just running in limited user mode. Ubuntu has the right idea..
--- We need more Ron Paul!
"Hi mom, I'm coming home this weekend, and I'll have a load of laundry. I'll also need some money because I can get P3NNY ST0X GO WILD OVER OTCBB FFFF! and some C1AL1S CHEAP AT HTTP //CHEAPERDR00GZ.MX/ !! Could you just transfer the funds to my account, it's easy to do, just go to 12.51.53.21/htedit/upload/pics/boa_rip/index.htm [bankofamerica.com]!"
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
The researchers predict that this will be extremely hard to detect, but they do offer a few suggestions for combating it.
You have to destroy its brain, of course.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
That doesn't sound like data mining, nor complicated data mining even... just a simple markoff-chain driven text generator would do. Anything more complicated than that wouldn't be data mining either, but rather computer linguistics.
As a Slashdot discussion grows longer, the probability of an analogy involving cars approaches one.
...is that they fail to mention the fact that _most_ (if not all) of these "spam zombies" happen to be Windows based machines. Agreed, most of the machines in the world run Windows, but shouldn't the news article atleast mention the fact that the 'zombification' is attributable (most of the time) to Windows vulnerabilities? Don't know if the UCalgary research team mentioned it in their paper.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Pet Peeve: Data mining is about making statistical inferences based on a large group of data and extracting patterns that nobody saw before.
Examining someone's address book, copying an email in the Outbox, and inserting junk in the middle of that is no more than low tech vandalism.
It's being used to disable the Bayesian-style filters that tend to work on keywords. Basically the idea is to flood the filter with a lot of junk messages that give false positives, thus making the filters less effective as the user attempts to tag all these junk messages as spam.
1990 called and wants their "$YEAR called and wants their $ITEM/CONCEPT back" meme back.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
I'm waiting for someone to come up with an expert system /AI that looks for new securtity exploits and then uses them to spread it's own code to other systems. Try filtering that out.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
This will make it even more difficult to have an affair!
"Hey Honey!
I hope to see you this weekend. I've increased my pen15! I've made sure the kids are 'spending the night' over at their friend's houses, and my wife's out. Now we'll get to celebrate our anniversary with those new nippl3 clamps I bought you!
Love and V1agra,
Hermie."
What does this exactly entail? Does the computer first have to be compromised? Spyware/spamware installed through a backdoor? I've lightly read through the paper and it does mention that some sort of malware may be present on the victim's machine.
Yes. This has been standard operating procedure for many spammers for about two years now. Virus, worm, and spyware authors set up backdoors through which compromised computers can be loaded with spam-sending software. Then they sell access to these botnets on the black market. Spammers use software designed to blast out commands to dozens or hundreds of bots sitting in homes, businesses and elsewhere, which then spew their virtual sludge across the internet.
The hardcore spammers effectively have infinite processing power and bandwidth, since they can distribute the load across a botnet, and when the same spam run is coming a few messages at a time from hundreds of IP addresses, it's a lot harder to blacklist by IP. That's why many ISPs have started filtering outgoing SMTP traffic, and why blacklists have cropped up that just block any incoming mail from dynamic IP space.
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.
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
Somehow, I don't think it is going to be difficult to tell the difference, simply because my friends are not trying to peddle things to me.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
I regularly recieve emails of exactly this nature to several addresses I use to deal with shady/or poorly managed state agencies. I noticed address mining of this sort at least 16 months ago. I typically know that a given shop will be calling for some sort of aid when I start getting my own (slightly modified and links added) back with own signature attached(once again slightly mispelled).
It is meta-criticisms all the way down.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Then I won't be in anybody's contact list.
Even though I wrote it myself, I am somewhat scared about the moderation. A couple of hour ago it was 3-Funny. It was intended to be funny. Now it is 4-Insightful.
I will not assume that a lot of slashdot users will support the idea of solving problems by removing the part of the population that causes the problem. Most will be aware that a) even idiots usually have positive sides, b) an idiot in one area may be a genius in another, c) trying to fix something complex like society with a hammer will most likely not result in the society you wanted and d) that it is ethically impossible to avoid misjudgment and injustice about who is worthy existing or not. I'm a native German and due to our history we are very aware what kind of disaster one can create if you allow yourself to consider something like this an acceptable solution, so I'm basically trained to be oversensitive about this issue. But "Insightful" is still scary.
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