Researchers Build TCP-Based Spam Detection 81
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.'"
Skip the ITWorld article (Score:5, Informative)
I'm sure 'itwbennett' would rather everyone go to his employer's website to read that article, but it is clearly not written (or edited) by anyone who has any basic clues about spam-fighting. Just reading the subtitle makes me cringe for the unfortunate "journalists" lassoed into writing it, as it was clearly done by spam neophytes in a desperate scramble for click-scrounging content. The article is vaguely about a paper presented almost a year ago at LISA '11. There are links to an abstract and the original paper at the LISA '11 site: http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa11/tech/ [usenix.org]
The general space of sniffing out spam by looking at TCP characteristics has been mined for years usefully with Symantec and MailChannels both offering proprietary tools that use such techniques and some open DNSBL's using TCP sniffing to identify sources, but it would be incorrect to believe that any one methodology will ever be a magical silver bullet against spam.