Spam distributors may “train” zombie computer systems to imitate and unleash a flood of spam that closely resembles the writing style of the compromised PC owner.
Associate Professor of Computer Science John Aycock and student Nathan Friess at the University of Calgary (Canada) discovered that cybercriminals can deceive nearly all spam filtering tools after gathering enough personal information from the computer, such as email writing style, message length, habits of capitalization, abbreviations, signatures, and more.
Aycock and Friess identified the main reason why filtering systems and users can recognize spam: “Spam typically originates from unknown and seemingly unreliable sources. However, this new ‘premium’ spam will change the landscape of spam thanks to the data they have collected.”
Aycock also emphasized: “Zombie systems are not just a launching pad for denial-of-service attacks or spam dissemination. They also contain a vast amount of information.”
For more details, see John Aycock’s report here.
T.N.
