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."

Comments

Reactive only

[oheso]

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.

Re:Not our claim... :-)

[Nimey]

You mean a Slashdot editor posted something sensational, and people didn't RTFM and believed the summary/headline? Never!