Spam Construction Trends

This paper replicates and extends Observed Trends in Spam Construction Techniques: A Case Study of Spam Evolution. A corpus of 169,274 spam email was collected over a period of five years. Each spam email was tested for construction techniques using SpamAssassin's spamicity tests. The results of these tests were collected in a database. Formal definitions of Pu and Webb's co-existence, extinction and complex trends were developed and applied to the results within the database. A comparison of the Spam Evolution Study and this paper's results took place to determine the relevance of the trends. A geolocation analysis was conducted on the corpus, as an extension, to determine the major geographic sources of the corpus. KEY WORDS Spam, Geolocation 

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ISSA
• Authors: Barry Irwin, Blake Friedman
• Keywords: Construction Techniques, Information Technology, ISSA 2008, Spam Email, Spam Evolution