White Papers

Fighting Unicode-Obfuscated Spam

Category: Software and Web Development, Security

Tags: spam

Overview In the last few years, obfuscation has been used more and more by spammers to make spam emails bypass filters. The standard method is to use images that look like text, since typical spam filters are unable to parse such messages. To fight image-based spam, many spam filters use heuristic rules in which emails containing images are flagged, and since not many legit emails are composed mainly of a big image, this aids in detecting image-based spam. This paper demonstrates the ease with which Unicode polymorphism can be used to circumvent spam filters such as SpamAssassin, and then describe a de-obfuscation technique that can be used to catch messages that have been obfuscated in this fashion.

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Publisher: Indiana University
File Format: PDF
Date Published: Oct 14, 2008
Format: White Papers
Topics: Spam - E-mail Fraud - Phishing, Email

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