Spammers catching on

Tue Dec 17 19:43:15 CET 2002

On Mon, Dec 16, 2002 at 08:09:02PM -0500, Suzanne Skinner wrote:
> Here's another case of sneaky, bayesian-filter-evading spammers. This one,
> alas, was successful: it scored around 0.5 with Robinson-Fisher. Fortunately,
> my SpamAssassin backup (threshold 10.0) caught it with a whopping 29 point
> score.

It's good that spammers are exploring these strategies so early. They
give us good 'food' for thought...

I suspect the next great leap forward in anti-spam techniques will involve
neural nets. After all, that's their big strength - categorizing things
with a sophistication that human-readable algorithms (like bayesian filters)
have trouble with.

I imagine the front end of such a tool would be almost identical to
bogofilter today - new email could be used to train the system further,
and false positives/negatives could be corrected by hand.  But instead of
the limited system of tokenizing and forming stats, the whole email would be
sent through the neural system and processed according to whatever structures
that system chose to recognize.

Be well,
Zack

> 
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> *********
> 
> Suzanne
> 
> -- 
> tril at igs.net - http://www.igs.net/~tril/
> 
> A Pope has a Water Cannon.                               It is a Water Cannon.
> He fires Holy-Water from it.                        It is a Holy-Water Cannon.
> He Blesses it.                                 It is a Holy Holy-Water Cannon.
> He Blesses the Hell out of it.          It is a Wholly Holy Holy-Water Cannon.
> He has it pierced.                It is a Holey Wholly Holy Holy-Water Cannon.
> Batman and Robin arrive.                                       He shoots them.
>                                     -- Principia Discordia
> 
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-- 
Zack Brown