Thursday, January 28, 2010

Botnet Judo / Spam Templates in the News



Ars Technica and The Wired Campus blog from The Chronicle of Higher Education both wrote, this week, about new spam-related computer science research to be presented in about a month at the being presented by UC San Diego and

The paper the stories described is "Botnet Judo: Fighting Spam with Itself." It will be presented at the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS). Andreas Pitsillidis, Kirill Levchenko, Christian Kreibich, Chris Kanich, Geoffrey M. Voelker, Vern Paxson, Nicholas Weaver, and Stefan Savage are the authors, from the Department of Computer Science at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and from the International Computer Science Institute at UC Berkeley.

A short bit of the Ars Technica story is below:
The creators of Botnet Judo, thanks to their work on Storm, decided that the use of templates might provide an opportunity to recognize any spam based on the same template. Since normal e-mail would be very unlikely to match a template by chance, this method should have a very low false-positive rate, where a legitimate message is recognized as spam.