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Submitted by: Bill Hickey
NCVA List Master

NRT-0203 Spammers Will Turn To Artificial Intelligence:

Some security experts believe spammers will increasingly use artificial intelligence (AI) tactics to get their messages delivered to email users. In a recent report published by US-based firm Forrester Research, experts said spammers will use AI to create seemingly endless variations on their message campaigns to circumvent the latest filtering tools. "People have devised new filters that use technologies such as optical character recognition that has curtailed the spread of image spam," said one of the researchers. "Unfortunately image spam is only one type of AI problem, and spammers have many they will use in the future; this is only the beginning of an arms race." Among the types of methods that spammers are already employing to beat existing image-filtering tools are spam campaigns that use distorted and obfuscated text images, graphic pictures, and audio and video files. The only way to prevent a repeat of the image spam surge as new models using AI come to light, Forrester analysts said, will be for technology vendors and their customers to abandon the current filtering- heavy approach and instead build products that attempt to capture the fundamental properties of spam, such as the links to high-risk web sites that most of the emails carry.

(techworld.com 01JUN07)

Last Modified: Saturday, 16-Jun-2007 10:24:33 EDT