Re: Media enquiry

On Friday 20 October 2006 18:55, Tony Meyer wrote:
> >> I'm currently writing a column in PC Authority magazine
> >> (www.pcauthority.com.au <http://www.pcauthority.com.au/> ) on the
> >> new wave
> >> of spam that use randomised or semi-randomised words to confound
> >> Bayesian
> >> filters.
> >
> > I can take this, cos it's in my timezone,
>
> Plus you speak the local language ;)

Does babelfish not have a Kiwi-ese to English translator? Pah.

> I think that people have shown that random words are pretty
> ineffective (e.g. John Graham-Cumming at 2004's MIT Spam
> Conference).  Random paragraphs (those news clippings and the like)
> are a bit more effective.  I think that image-based spam is clearly
> far superior to any sort of random-word technique, though (although
> some of the image-spam also has the random words - I'm not sure that
> really helps the spammer, though).

The stuff that slips through for me tends to have a lot of individual
lines from various news articles, smashed together randomly. My favourite one
(this didn't get through - I just noticed it when emptying my spam box) was 
one that had something like
[%RANDOM_LINE_1%]
[%RANDOM_LINE_2%]
[%RANDOM_LINE_3%]
[%RANDOM_LINE_4%]

Ah spammers - clearly they're the best and the brightest. :)

The nasty one which I've only seen occasionally would be one that spammed by 
replying to an email you'd already sent (either from a public mailing list 
archive or from the mailbox of a compromised PC). Fortunately, the cost to 
individualise spams like this is much much higher than mass random blasting, 
so I've seen very very little of it. The ones I have seen seem to be manually 
entered - someone will reply to a post with "Have you heard about 
XYZspamproduct" with a link. 

Image spam could be more of a problem, except that the less text in the 
message, the more header clues come into play, as well. While SB doesn't do a 
massive amount of, for instance, RBL checking, defense in depth 
(spamassassin+graylisting on the server, SB on the client) seems pretty 
effective. 

I'll email the guy back.
Anthony
-- 
Anthony Baxter     <[email protected]>
It's never too late to have a happy childhood.