Researchers Build TCP-Based Spam Detection

itwbennett writes "In a presentation at the Usenix LISA conference in Boston, researchers from the Naval Academy showed that signal analysis of factors such as timing, packet reordering, congestion and flow control can reveal the work of a spam-spewing botnet. The work 'advanced both the science of spam fighting and ... worked through all the engineering challenges of getting these techniques built into the most popular open-source spam filter,' said MIT computer science research affiliate Steve Bauer, who was not involved with the work. 'So this is both a clever bit of research and genuinely practical contribution to the persistent problem of fighting spam.'"