Spam Gets Personal

Vitaly Friedman writes "Two researchers demonstrate how much more effective spam could become if its authors used basic data-mining to personalize their messages. From the article: "North America, though no longer the world leader in spam production, still has serious potted meat problems. A recent research paper out of the University of Calgary suggests that those problems could soon be a lot worse if spam creators adopt a few simple data-mining procedures.""

Comments

don't kid yourselves

[Anonymous Coward]

Th US most definately is the world leader in the production of spam

treat the disease not the symptoms

Duh!

[Billosaur]

The reason they don't do this now is that the spammers doing it are not geeks. They're taking pre-built scripts, modifying some parameters, and letting them go. They will keep doing this until those scripts no longer work, and then they will move onto newer ones. The only was this will happen is if some hacker gets bored, reads this article, and desides there's a lot of cash to be made selling just such a thing to the spammers.

Be real -- no matter how personalized an email gets, I'm still going to know it's not from somebody I know, because I don't make email my primary mode of correspondence and where I do, I can easily figure out that my mother isn't going to be sending me ads for Viagra.

Now, if they could make a Turing-capable spam generator, I'd be impressed.

Actually snail mail is just as broken...

[Lispy]

Every day I get quite upset by opening my reallife mailbox.
It's totally unacceptable: Buried below a ton of trash I find two seriously dangerous invoices with 4digit numbers in the red. If I ever miss out one of them I'd probably go to jail, but hey, why not throw another pizza flyer on top of all that, the planet sure can handle this and what else are those trees for?

Personally if I was going to choose I'd vote for e-mail spam just to get rid of this total waste of ressources.
There should be a LAW against this, and against buying from spammers, reallife or virtual.

Targetted Spam

[overshoot]

Sort of an oxymoron, isn't it?

The whole point of the spam business model is that it's low-cost. Any filtering would raise costs compared to simply flooding the world with the same payload.

If spammers were in the slightest interested in addressing their markets, I wouldn't be seeing several thousand Asian-language spam per day addressed to a North American mail server. None of us would be seeing spam with hash-busters, mangled "Subject:" lines, and other filter avoidance hacks.

This seems like one more attempt to promote the idea of "good spam" for mainsleazers like Kohl's department stores.

Real spam research

[gvc]

Why does Slashdot not report on real spam research? They report puff pieces like this and the phishing talk from the MIT Spam Conference, but not the results of TREC 2005 Spam Track (Hint: an outsider using compression techniques was very strong; open source filters like crm114, dbacl, bogofilter and spamassasin were close behind; DSPAM was middle of the pack.) No filter came close to demonstrating those widely-claimed 99.9-whatever% accuracy figures. I guess "news for nerds -- stuff that matters" includes testimonials but not results.

The TREC tests involved tests on 350,000 email messages. A 92,000 message public corpus from this effort is available for free download.

John Graham-Cumming (no relation to TREC) has created SpamOrHam -- a community-based effort to adjudicate the judgements in the TREC corpus. This'll let us test in a big way Yerazunis' contention that spam filters are better than humans.

Any filter writer can participtate in TREC 2006 by submitting a letter of intent now and a filter in due course.

There's also an upcoming scientific spam conference this summer - CEAS.