The Insidiousness of Spammers
Recently, the war on SPAM has taken a new turn. Meaningless messsages.
The important thing about these messages is that they are designed to destroy bayesian spam
filtering methods by poisioning the well. Bayesian spam filtering was originated by Paul Graham in his groundbreaking paper A Plan for Spam.
He was the first person to use the technique and it proved extremely successful. A host of implementors came forward with bayesian spam filters and they have been keeping my inbox clean for some time now (I’m a Spamassassin man myself).
Anyway, these bayesian filters have a weakness: training. By flooding auto-learning Bayesian filters with dictionary words the spamers seem to hope to render the filters useless. I would expect to see a huge influx of new spam right in time for the holiday season, thanks to the assault these nonsense bombs are creating.
In case you’re wondering, that’s my new word ” Nonsense Bomb”. I am Shocked and Awed by the this move from the spammers, and we thought we’d won the war.
