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Researchers Claim "Effectively Perfect" Spam Blocking Discovery
A team of computer scientists from the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, CA are claiming to have found an "effectively perfect" method for blocking spam. The new system deciphers the templates a botnet is using to create spam and then teaches filters what to look for. "The system ... works by exploiting a trick that spammers use to defeat email filters. As spam is churned out, subtle changes are typically incorporated into the messages to confound spam filters. Each message is generated from a template that specifies the message content and how it should be varied. The team reasoned that analyzing such messages could reveal the template that created them. And since the spam template describes the entire range of the emails a bot will send, possessing it might provide a watertight method of blocking spam from that bot."
Sure, it will work "perfectly" for about 2 days, until the spammers change their methods to work around it. This is an arms race; there is no "final solution" (although modifying the email protocol to allow authentication of the sender's address would be a big help.)
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
And since most devices will download updates and things automatically, new templates could be discovered and pushed out as well. I'm sure there will be some work around that the spammers will figure out, but hey, I'm up for most anything that will cut down/stop/prevent spam. I am also still a fan of the 'kill them until they die from it' club when it comes to spammers.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
So it still needs to see a certain volume of spams in order to figure out the template. Then it reacts to the template. Then when the spammers figure out it's uncovered the template, they change the template. Spam will exist until the fundamental nature of e-mail operation changes.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Take it to the limit, everybody to the limit, come on, everybody fhqwhgads.
A team of hackers from Russia are claiming to have found an "effectively perfect" method for countering spam blocking technology. The new system deciphers the templates Spam Blocker is using to filter spam and then teaches spam generators what to write.
As long as there is money to be made in spam, spammers will continue to send spam. This "discovery" does nothing for that. Indeed it just dedicates more CPU time to trying to identify spam, which is just another way that internet users shoulder the cost of the profitability of spamming.
I've said it before, and I'll continue to say it - spam is an economic problem. Until something is done to address the money that spammers make, they will continue to find ways around these "effectively perfect" "discoveries".
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Furthermore, bad will always win because good is dumb.
Note that the "good guys" revealed their methods immediately after discovery, which means the "bad guys" can start looking for a workaround. The "bad guys" won't make the same slip.
Effectively perfect, no. If nothing else, for certain classes of spam(especially phishing) the money or perception of money can be good enough to keep actual humans at the keyboard.
/dev/urandom, is that you both need to peddle whatever it is you are peddling and look vaguely like a human constructed message. If the researchers can, in fact, target messages that bear signs of being generated from a given template, the spammers will be forced to be looser in generating messages from templates(which increases the risk of garbling beyond comprehension, or being flagged by filters looking for highly non-human output) or step up their game in terms of natural language synthesis.
However, the reason you use templates, rather than word salad or the first 100kb of
You mean a Slashdot editor posted something sensational, and people didn't RTFM and believed the summary/headline? Never!
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
The truth is that spam has been successfully fought by filters without compromising legitimate email. Furthermore as Paul Graham had stated, spammers have been forced to yield in smaller text-based messages or in-line images.
In particular,
(X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
Possibly but the probability of losing legitimate email by modern heuristics is (proven) smaller than the probability of accidentally deleting it when it is mixed with spam.
(X) Users of email will not put up with it
They do, sometimes without their knowledge
(X) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
They would lose more without filtering. See 1st argument.
(X) Asshats
How ?
(X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X) Extreme profitability of spam
And also extreme profitability in having a working e-mail address.
(X) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
This isn't the mid 90s anymore.
(X) Ideas similar to this are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
The practicality of heuristic filtering (SpamAssassin etc) is proved by its transparency. Even old e-mail clients such as Outlook 97 can filter out email marked by X-Spam headers. Gmail and the rest of the privacy traders do it for you automatically.
(X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
Run it locally. Mozilla Messaging does.
(X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
Age old forms copied from the newsgroups can't be used as arguments anymore. Time to be creative again!
(X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
But cutting down their profit is.