Re: asrg - research or die

On Mar 20, 2013, at 1:21 PM, Dotzero <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 1:58 PM, Barry Shein <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> But even focusing on "what would be research? what would be progress
>> (on the problem at hand)?"  would be more productive than "what is
>> spam?"
>> 
> 
> I think it would be interesting to see a project that examines
> phishing/malware emails to determine whether email authentication
> (DMARC/SPF/DKIM) or other practices would have prevented the malicious
> email from reaching endusers.

I did that briefly, looking at both phishing attempts for, and legitimate mail from
one particular company, as seen at my inbox.

The results[1] were not what people wanted to hear, so I didn't bother digging
deeper or formalizing the results.

Unless you're in academia, where you justify your existence by publishing
papers, there doesn't seem much benefit to doing research that won't affect
behaviour.

An end goal beyond the (perfectly reasonable) "it'd be interesting" seems
like something to consider.

Cheers,
  Steve

[1] Flipping a coin was a better phishing filter, both in terms of false
positives and false negatives, than DKIM+ADSP.

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