According to this article, a team of computer scientists at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, has developed an “effectively perfect” method of filtering spam from botnets. The system works by reverse engineering the spam bot’s template to predict how it will vary messages in order to fool 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.
The hype around this tactic assumes that no one else has already implemented it (if we have, we’re not telling). Obviously this would be a good weapon in anyone’s anti-spam arsenal but touting it as “effectively perfect” is a bit hyperbolic. This tactic also fails to consider that the spammer’s templates themselves can also be designed to randomly mutate, thus making reverse engineering a much more difficult task, and dependent upon access to a large enough data sample.
The spam war has always been an escalating arms race. Whenever a “perfect” anti-spam tactic is developed elite spammers soon find a way to circumvent it. Shortly thereafter the technology finds its way to less resourceful spammers and the status quo is maintained.
Our own spam control system depends on continuous analysis of various existing spam attack vectors as well as identifying and responding to new spam tactics. Like the influenza virus, spam constantly evolves in order to survive. Accordingly, spam control techniques also evolve.
Eventually we hope to find a cure for spam. Until then we’ll just have to settle for doing a really good job of controlling it.
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