A collaborative approach for spam detection

Electronic mail is nowadays one of the most important Internet networking services. However, there are still many challenges that should be faced in order to provide a better e-mail service quality, such as the growing dissemination of unsolicited e-mail (spam) over the Internet. This work aims to foster new research efforts giving ground to the development of novel collaborative approaches to deal with spam proliferation. Using the proposed system, which is able to complement other anti-spam solutions, end-users are allowed to share and combine spam filters in a flexible way, increasing the accuracy and resilience levels of anti-spam techniques.(undefined

Let Your CyberAlter Ego Share Information and Manage Spam

Almost all of us have multiple cyberspace identities, and these {\em cyber}alter egos are networked together to form a vast cyberspace social network. This network is distinct from the world-wide-web (WWW), which is being queried and mined to the tune of billions of dollars everyday, and until recently, has gone largely unexplored. Empirically, the cyberspace social networks have been found to possess many of the same complex features that characterize its real counterparts, including scale-free degree distributions, low diameter, and extensive connectivity. We show that these topological features make the latent networks particularly suitable for explorations and management via local-only messaging protocols. {\em Cyber}alter egos can communicate via their direct links (i.e., using only their own address books) and set up a highly decentralized and scalable message passing network that can allow large-scale sharing of information and data. As one particular example of such collaborative systems, we provide a design of a spam filtering system, and our large-scale simulations show that the system achieves a spam detection rate close to 100%, while the false positive rate is kept around zero. This system has several advantages over other recent proposals (i) It uses an already existing network, created by the same social dynamics that govern our daily lives, and no dedicated peer-to-peer (P2P) systems or centralized server-based systems need be constructed; (ii) It utilizes a percolation search algorithm that makes the query-generated traffic scalable; (iii) The network has a built in trust system (just as in social networks) that can be used to thwart malicious attacks; iv) It can be implemented right now as a plugin to popular email programs, such as MS Outlook, Eudora, and Sendmail.Comment: 13 pages, 10 figure

Spam on the Internet: can it be eradicated or is it here to stay?

A discussion of the rise in unsolicited bulk e-mail, its effect on tertiary education, and some of the methods being used or developed to combat it. Includes an examination of block listing, protocol change, economic and computational solutions, e-mail aliasing, sender warranted e-mail, collaborative filtering, rule-based and statistical solutions, and legislation

Spam

With the advent of the electronic mail system in the 1970s, a new opportunity for direct marketing using unsolicited electronic mail became apparent. In 1978, Gary Thuerk compiled a list of those on the Arpanet and then sent out a huge mailing publicising Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC—now Compaq) systems. The reaction from the Defense Communications Agency (DCA), who ran Arpanet, was very negative, and it was this negative reaction that ensured that it was a long time before unsolicited e-mail was used again (Templeton, 2003). As long as the U.S. government controlled a major part of the backbone, most forms of commercial activity were forbidden (Hayes, 2003). However, in 1993, the Internet Network Information Center was privatized, and with no central government controls, spam, as it is now called, came into wider use. The term spam was taken from the Monty Python Flying Circus (a UK comedy group) and their comedy skit that featured the ironic spam song sung in praise of spam (luncheon meat)—“spam, spam, spam, lovely spam”—and it came to mean mail that was unsolicited. Conversely, the term ham came to mean e-mail that was wanted. Brad Templeton, a UseNet pioneer and chair of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has traced the first usage of the term spam back to MUDs (Multi User Dungeons), or real-time multi-person shared environment, and the MUD community. These groups introduced the term spam to the early chat rooms (Internet Relay Chats). The first major UseNet (the world’s largest online conferencing system) spam sent in January 1994 and was a religious posting: “Global alert for all: Jesus is coming soon.” The term spam was more broadly popularised in April 1994, when two lawyers, Canter and Siegel from Arizona, posted a message that advertized their information and legal services for immigrants applying for the U.S. Green Card scheme. The message was posted to every newsgroup on UseNet, and after this incident, the term spam became synonymous with junk or unsolicited e-mail. Spam spread quickly among the UseNet groups who were easy targets for spammers simply because the e-mail addresses of members were widely available (Templeton, 2003)