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Box of Meat antispam blog has a link to an article on ZDNet: 1.5m spam emails sent from compromised University accounts . Some excerpts: “Hackers gained access to the University of Otago staff email server recently and used it to send out
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A quick update on CNN spam, they have morphed their subject lines and are now breaking news alerts for MSNBC. I haven't seen any personally (nor did I receive a phone call at 3 am alerting me to this) but others on our spam team have. Apparently,
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Following on from my previous post on the interview with the spam chief at Yahoo, I thought I'd respond to a couple more things that Mark Risher said. bartonas: What is the effect, if any, other than putting it back in my in-box, of me selecting "not
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The spam outbreak "from" CNN the occurred this past week has morphed into a new breed: It appears that the spammers have learned from previous mistakes because this one is a little slicker. In the body contents, just like the old one it contains
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A few days ago, Yahoo antispam chief Mark Risher hosted a Q&A session with various users and answered their questions, both pre-submitted and live questions. I thought I'd chime in and take some selected quotes from the session and add my own
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I've been seeing some CNN spam the past few days, that is, spam in the form of breaking news stories from CNN.com. Below is a sample: These all look like legitimate news stories, and indeed, they probably are taken straight from an actual CNN news
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A month ago one of our spam analysts came across a Bank of America phishing spam. The thing about this one is that it is one of the best I've seen in a long time: This is very legitimate-looking. The logo is legitimate, it has correct grammar
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Continuing on in my series of rebuttals to the reviewers of my paper, I'd like to respond to the third and final review. I agree with the author that a set of common metrics is paramount for being able to measure and compare current approaches, and use
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Continuing on in my rebuttals to the reviewers who refused my paper (which I believe is my right... if they can review it and refuse then I can disagree with their reasons for refusal), I'd like to move on to the second reviewer. The definitions given
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I just finished a series on spam metrics and I submitted to the CEAS in order to get it accepted such that I could speak at the conference this year. I put it together in two days. Well, as it turns out, it was rejected. The reviews on it were anonymous,
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6. Grey Mail For all of our discussions around spam and non-spam, there is still the issue of grey mail. What is grey mail? Do we include grey mail in our spam corpus? Should we include it in the non-spam corpus or omit it altogether? To begin with, let’s
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4. Combining FPs and FNs Suppose we were evaluating two filters, Filter A and Filter B. Filter A has a catch rate of 91% but an FP rate of 5%. Filter B has a catch rate of 75% but an FP rate of 2%. Which is better? How can we combine the two metrics?
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3. Measurements The first way to do this is by way of Catch Rate. Catch rate is defined by the following: Catch rate = = Spam correctly identified / (Spam correctly identified+missed spam) = TP / (TP+FN) This Catch rate gives us the effectiveness of a
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2. Definitions The email industry needs to converge on a set of standards around metrics. Specifically, while we all think we know what we mean, what we don’t know is what others think they mean. So, let’s define them: Legitimate mail (ham)
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A few weeks ago I submitted a paper to the CEAS (Conference on Email and Antispam). My paper was rejected but I thought I would reprint it here. I ended up writing this paper in two days. I either had to write a 10-page paper or a 3-page one.
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