SPAM at its least is an irritation as we all know and can attest. At the worst, however, it is the cover under which the intruder comes skulking to the network. Complex attacks can hide under that cover a SPAM attack, hoping to obfuscate the logging and flood the network. I've heard of companies getting hit with 10's of thousands of SPAM messages in a short period of time. Distracted by the SPAM, the network admins didn't realize until a while afterwards that their servers had been rooted in the process. IMHO, SPAM is akin to the sweat that keeps running into your eyes while you're in the middle of a fight... irritating... and very damaging if timed right. -Jack -----Original Message----- From: Michael Smith [mailto:codeyeti@private] Sent: Monday, June 02, 2003 3:23 PM To: CRIME Subject: Re: CRIME Interesting way around spam filter I think it's getting to the point where it affects the availability of a company's mail system. It also makes any sort of backup and recovery plan harder. I've just installed bogofilter and used spamassassin to teach it, along with an archive of 30,000 pieces of spam. I know bogofilter does analysis on html tags, because a red font in the html is considered a better gauge of spamicity than most words. Cheers --Mike ----- Original Message ----- From: "Crispin Cowan" <crispin@private> To: "Shaun Savage" <savages@private> Cc: "CRIME" <crime@private> Sent: Monday, June 02, 2003 11:35 AM Subject: Re: CRIME Interesting way around spam filter > Shaun Savage wrote: > > > I don't look at mush spam, but this caught my eye. Not the spam but > > the why it is hidden inside HTML. > > Yeah, they've been doing that for a couple of months now. It is clearly > aimed at frustrating word-based spam recognition. > > In a similar time span, my Mozilla Bayesian spam filter's effectiveness > has dropped like a rock, now recognizing only about 50% of spam. > > Question: is it the case that Mozilla Bayesian spam filtering is done > only on the raw message text? Or do they do word analysis on rendered > HTML as well? For that matter, where is the documentation on what it is > analyzing? I can't find it. > > More broadly: does the community believe that spam has become so bad > that it can be considered a security problem? > > Thanks, > Crispin
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