Don't plan to sell your first chip - Bob Colwell, former Intel chief architect
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Boffins come up with a spam fighting tool
A TEAM of computer boffins have emerged from their smoke filled labs with an "effectively perfect" method for blocking the most common kind of spam.
The system, developed by a team at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California, and the University of California, San Diego, looks at a trick that spammers use to defeat email filters.
According to New Scientist, as a spam email is made by a botnet it is changed to confound spam filters. However each message is generated from a template that specifies the message content. The team worked out that analysing such messages could reveal the template that created them and then it would provide a watertight method of blocking spam from that bot.
Testing the idea, the team installed a previously captured software bot onto a machine. After analysing 1,000 emails generated by this compromised machine the researchers were able to reverse-engineer the template.
Once they had identified the template then it was possible to enable filters to block further spam from that bot with 100 per cent accuracy.
The research will be presented in March at the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium in San Diego. µ
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Even SPF won't work. I have a client who uses two services which forge senders from a pool of mail servers to claim they are coming from his domain. The continual stream of forwarded failure messages is annoying to both him and me. BUT, if they were doing this properly the SPF record permitting only the "real" mail server wouldn't be an issue.
You hit it right on the head.
If you can't be part of the solution, there's plenty of money to be made in prolonging the problem.
That's great, but bots don't make bots, people do and they can read too.
The best way of countering spam other than by SPF is not to tell anyone how you do it and just keep doing it.
Here's another idea... block all email that contains consonants. That wll also block 100% of (current) spam.
The only effective way to stop spam is SPF. However domainadmins are too lazy or ignorant to put SPF records in their DNS, so as of today we have only about 10% of total domains on board. Less than enough for effective spam fight.
But after all Spam is just like viruses - there is too much money in it to "fight" it for real.
great stuff until the template is automatically constantly changed enough to confound the anti-template etc....
Sounds promising.