Breaking Anti-Spam Systems with Parasitic Spam

The existance of networks of `bots' raises the possibility of a new type of spam that breaks the current paradigm of spam defense, in which the defence acts purely as a filter. This spam, which we call parasitic spam, looks to a filter very much like spam with scraped text, but contains instead legitimate content going from a legitimate sender to a legitimate recipient. In this problem statement, we will discuss what parasitic spam is and is not, the likelihood of parasitic spam appearing in the wild, and possible countermeasures.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: CEAS
• Authors: Morton Swimmer, Ian Whalley, Barry Leiba, Nathaniel S. Borenstein
• Keywords: CEAS 2006, Internet Technology, Legitimate Content, Parasitic Spam, Spam Defense