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

Hybrid Spam Filtering for Mobile Communication

Spam messages are an increasing threat to mobile communication. Several mitigation techniques have been proposed, including white and black listing, challenge-response and content-based filtering. However, none are perfect and it makes sense to use a combination rather than just one. We propose an anti-spam framework based on the hybrid of content-based filtering and challenge-response. There is the trade-offs between accuracy of anti-spam classifiers and the communication overhead. Experimental results show how, depending on the proportion of spam messages, different filtering %%@ parameters should be set.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, 1 tabl

Forgery in Cyberspace: The Spoof Could Be on You!

Spoofing is one of the newest forms of cyber-attack, a technological methodology adapted to mask the identity of spammers who have faced hostile reaction in response to bulk, unsolicited, electronic mail messages.[1] Sending Spam, however, is no longer the only reason for deception, as crackers have taken pleasure in the challenge of manipulating computer systems and, additionally, find recreational enjoyment in doing so. In this legal Note, the author’s intent is to show that criminal, rather than civil liability is the best way to effectively deter and punish the spoofer. The injury that results when a computer system’s technological safety measures fail to adequately safeguard the system affects not only the owner of the hijacked e-mail address, but also the Internet Service Provider, and the Network as a whole. Current Anti-Spam Legislation is arguably ineffective at targeting these particular types of malicious attacks, and a different legal approach is suggested

Escalating The War On SPAM Through Practical POW Exchange

Proof-of-work (POW) schemes have been proposed in the past. One prominent system is HASHCASH (Back, 2002) which uses cryptographic puzzles . However, work by Laurie and Clayton (2004) has shown that for a uniform proof-of-work scheme on email to have an impact on SPAM, it would also be onerous enough to impact on senders of "legitimate" email. I suggest that a non-uniform proof-of-work scheme on email may be a solution to this problem, and describe a framework that has the potential to limit SPAM, without unduly penalising legitimate senders, and is constructed using only current SPAM filter technology, and a small change to the SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol). Specifically, I argue that it is possible to make sending SPAM 1,000 times more expensive than sending "legitimate" email (so called HAM). Also, unlike the system proposed by Debin Liu and Jean Camp (2006), it does not require the complications of maintaining a reputation system.Comment: To be presented at the IEEE Conference On Networking, Adelaide, Australia, November 19-21, 200

Stacking classifiers for anti-spam filtering of e-mail

We evaluate empirically a scheme for combining classifiers, known as stacked generalization, in the context of anti-spam filtering, a novel cost-sensitive application of text categorization. Unsolicited commercial e-mail, or "spam", floods mailboxes, causing frustration, wasting bandwidth, and exposing minors to unsuitable content. Using a public corpus, we show that stacking can improve the efficiency of automatically induced anti-spam filters, and that such filters can be used in real-life applications