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Implementing Antispam Strategies to Combat Gibberish in Spam Emails

"Daphnia blue-crested fish cattle, darkorange fountain moss, beaverwood educating, eyeblinking advancing, dulltuned amazons...." This is not a failed attempt at free-form prose. It's a snippet of a spam message intended to promote a sexual stimulant, a deliberate crack at sneaking past and spoiling some of the most popular antispam filters. . . .. "Daphnia blue-crested fish cattle, darkorange fountain moss, beaverwood educating, eyeblinking advancing, dulltuned amazons...." This is not a failed attempt at free-form prose. It's a snippet of a spam message intended to promote a sexual stimulant, a deliberate crack at sneaking past and spoiling some of the most popular antispam filters. Antispam experts agreed that this isn't a brand-new technique, but said the addition of potentially filter-foiling gibberish is rapidly becoming a common component of spam. "I'd say at least half of the spam that I bother to look at now contains a paragraph or two of random blather. Until recently we'd see it in only one or two spams a week at the most," said Anthony Baxter, one of the developers of SpamBayes, a free, open-source Bayesian antispam filter. "This is yet another escalation of the arms race between spammers and those people who like to have a useful e-mail inbox," Baxter added. The addition of seemingly nonsensical words is aimed at confusing the antispam filters that incorporate Bayesian analysis techniques, such as SpamBayes and SpamAssassin. These filters examine incoming e-mail messages and calculate the probability of it being spam based on each message's contents. The link for this article located at Wired.com is no longer available. . The unsolicited email landscape is always evolving as spammers invent tactics to bypass advanced filters, using techniques like "word salad" to confuse systems and degrade spam detection. Antispam Techniques, Spam Filtering, Email Security, Bayesian Analysis. . Anthony Pell

Jan 14, 2004 • Anthony Pell Network Security