SpoofJunk!
- I've tried it. I don't like it.
Favourite junk e-mail of the day. Say it three times backwards.
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What's interesting about this mail is that it has no payload at all. There's no virus in here, and no marketing message. I can only assume that it exists solely to try to lessen the effectiveness of Bayesian Filtering, often lauded as the most effective spam solution.
Bayesian filtering works by working out the probability that a message is spam. It picks up on words and groups of characters that would appear regularly in spam, and similarly with regular mail. Over time, a Bayesian algorithm works out the probability that a message is junk with a fairly low chance of marking genuine mail as junk.
The strength of Bayesian filters is that they evolve. If you get a lot of junk mail that contains the word v!@gra, for instance, the filter would "learn" that this word only appears in undesirable mail...
So, the aim of this mail seems to be
- to create spam that doesn't have anything in common with other spam
- in particular, with many of the characteristics of genuine mail, but none of the characteristics of spam
- in order to make spam filters flag an increased volume of genuine mail as junk mail
- so that people will stop using them, so more junk mail can get through
Damn clever, really. Spoofjunk, I salute you.
12 January, 2004
