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Writing from CEAS with quick notes on each talk. Proceedings are at http://www.ceas.cc/papers-2004/papersbytopic.htm .

All ports except 80 and 443 are blocked! Very annoying (wink)

Chung-Kwei:

  • Teiresias is IBM's pattern-discovery tool from bioinformatics
  • looks *directly* transferrable to SpamAssassin's "regexp rules" approach
  • probably heavily patented and hard to license though
  • but a Google search for "pattern discovery algorithm" looks like a promising source (wink)

Social network talk:

  • pretty useless; not any spam orientation at all

Joshua Goodman Received talk:

  • talking about parsing Received lines
  • basically reimplementing spamcop algorithm
  • looking for "last external IP address"
  • thinks this will be useful for SenderID
  • SenderID example uses HELO data, looks like, instead of PRA or SMTP MAIL FROM; due to multiple intervening hops
  • try to use heuristics to find last external IP address:
    • using MX data fails due to load-balancing edge router
    • also the msn.com/hotmail.com problem
  • proposed algo:
    • IP addr is 192.168
    • HELO matches user's domain and forward DNS lookup of HELO matches IP address
    • find an IP that matches MX record, next is external
  • Bob Atk suggested putting external IP addrs in a DNS record?!
  • interesting that they'd never checked SpamAssassin or Spamcop's algorithms, but that's MS for you (wink)

Brett Watson: beyond identity: problems even with sender id

  • economics of whitelisting/blacklisting based on a reliable sender identification (ie. forging is no longer possible)
  • mostly a philsophical talk

Multiple email addresses:

  • about 50% of surveyed users had multiple email addresses
  • "identities"; separation of work, personal, social groups; pseudo-anonymity; affiliation, status, prestige (alumni accts)
  • mobility (available on the road)
  • people now frequently have different "role" accounts
  • typically once people go over 3 accts, they set them up to forward to a smaller number
  • 20-30% of all email addrs change annually
  • this talk is really oriented towards MUA UI developers
  • another talk with not a whole lot of antispam relevance (sad)

Panel discussion of monetary spam filtering:

  • Cynthia Dwork's talk:
    • 16 seconds per message computation time doubles spam cost
    • 56 seconds per message " means $36 per message for spammers
    • cycle theft arguments (zombies are illegal; spyware can be combatted with user @+ education) *already don't work* in the real world
  • MailFrontier:
    • some kind of marketroid noise about how they're "third generation" because they have grey areas, or something; combination of multiple tests means "definitely spam, no false positives". riiight
    • "Reverse Turing Test": C-R as usual, with pictures of puppies
    • except the C-R page has some kind of plugin which will burn CPU cycles instead, woo
  • The naysayer:
    • http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/
    • going rate to solve puzzles is about $.11/hr in South India
    • Real Money systems: people will regulate it; EU Directive on E-Money (2000/46/EC)
    • people will walk away with 2.5% of it (cost of running + greed)
    • people will steal it (e.g. sysadmin skimming x% of incoming mails and stealing their tokens)
    • Payment systems: settlement: see taugh.com
    • also compares with the telco system (~1200mill ham mails/day, ~2000mill phone calls per day) – much fewer calls on telco system, most local, diff trust model
    • how much payment:
      • 30 responses per mill: .1c/mail mean $33 per sale to be viable
      • if .05c/mail, $16
      • at a 0.7% response rate, $33 profit means 23c/mail
  • questions:
    • to Ironport: "why can't I nominate a charity?" to avoid interested parties
    • Dan Kohn to Ironport: "how much bonds debited?" not very much
    • question from an Indian querier: "any documented cases of South Indian kids clicking on CAPTCHAs?" MailFrontier guy, naturally, says "nope". In reality, the answer is "yes", but that was in Thailand
    • Yahoo! guy on CAPTCHAs: "seen everything: porn sites, people paid to type them; sites in Russia with full pages of CAPTCHAs, 10 hour turnaround after a new fix is deployed"
    • Vanquish guy says they use CMU's CAPTCHA code
    • question on CPU time stamp inflation: Cynthia Dwork says "memory cycles much more stable over time"
    • Daniel: annoyed about senders having to "prove they are real" when they're doing the recipient a favour: MailFrontier guy: "we just want the problem to go away"
    • Dave Crocker: "why didn't anyone on the panel take any notice of the naysayer's presentation and its points?"
    • panel: "but we have only 5 minutes!"
    • Vanquish guy: "he doesn't understand how PKI works" (!!!) then some advertising for Vanquish (again)
    • Ironport: "Bonded Sender is working right now"
    • MailFrontiers guy: "mostly agreed with his presentation, but we'll do whatever works (titters from audience); C-R is an atomic bomb against spam, but with some collateral damage against ham, but it can be turned off"
    • naysayer on pay-to-send: "not only is my machine insecure, my email is insecure, but I don't want my *money* to be insecure" (applause)
    • panel mod: there will be coevolution between attacker and defender, a lesson from the Cold War

MailFrontier presentation: anatomy of a phishing email

  • Bank of America sends email from bankofamerica1.com, Sony from sonystar.com; this screws up the notion of a trusted domain name
  • the MSIE %00 vulnerability
  • high-numbered ports mean that websites can be run unnoticed, even if a HTTP server is already running
  • the fake address-bar window trick
  • fraudulent pop-ups over real site: goes to fraud site, create popup, go to fraud site: pop-ups are a phishing risk (yay!)
  • "your submitted information will be verified by eBay staff within 24 hours"; buys more time
  • A survey, based on results from over 83,450 respondents (subset of total responses), in diagnosing which sites were frauds and which were real:
    • 26.7% got everything wrong
    • only 13.8% of respondents got all correct
  • da.ru is a frequent hosting site for phishing scams
  • hasn't looked at the Active/X malware on the phishing sites, for some reason!
  • Consumer Reports sends from some domain called "d1sub.com"; Fortune 500's should really improve their practices
  • q: "are we getting to a stage where we won't be able to tell phish from ham?" a from audience: "use pine"
  • q: "why haven't the arrests of phishers been publicised better?" suggests including some support in web browser for a "trusted logos" area on-screen, for certifications
  • Dave Crocker: don't map to domain names, "domain names are not good enough, they do *not* map to trademarks".

Geoff Hulten, MS: Trends in Spam Products and Exploits

  • corpus analysis, from Hotmail's feedback loop
    • volunteers classify random samples of their mail as spam or good; tens of thousands of hand-classified messages per day; large "unbiased" (???) sample of spam
  • additional analysis on two sets of spam:
    • about a year between the two
    • products sold, exploits used, trends
  • viagra types: 17% 2003, to 34% 2004
  • graphic porn down: 13% to 7%
  • exploits: increasing rapidly, 1.33 exploits 2003 to 1.73 in 2004
  • word obscuring: up to 20% in 2004
  • URL chaffing, adding good URLs to spam: not there in 2003, 10% in 2004 – anti-SURBL attack (wink)
  • Spammers are putting more work into each spam
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