Analysis%20Of%20Email%20Spam

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Analysis Of Email Spam

• Presented by
• TEAM SPARKS
• Gayatri Venkat
• Hari Khanal
• Tony Nguyen

2
Agenda

• What is Email Spam
• Reasons for Email Spam
• Analysis of Email Spam
• Spam Reduction Measures
• Developments made to reduce Spam
• Future of Spam
• Conclusion

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Email Spam

• What is Email SPAM?
• Email Pollution
• Advertisement of Products
• Source of Income
• Why Spam?
• Low Cost
• Easy to Use
• Free Target Audience

4
How Spam Works

• Advertisers
• Spam Service Providers
• Spam Support Services

5
Source of Email Address

• Newsgroups and Chatrooms
• Websites
• Email Servers
• Advertisements
• Email Addresses from Companies
• Compromised Computers
• Social Engineering

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Spam, what's the big deal?

• Useless, unsolicited information
• Hacking (computers compromised for spam
  purposes)?
• Illegal (potential unlawful content)?
• Costly (bandwidth, CPU cycles, storage)?

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Anti-spam vs. Spam

• Keyword detection filter text content for key
  phrases
• Alter text (viagra to v1agra)?
• Text embedded in images
• Blacklist list of IP addresses to block
  incoming mails (needs to stay updated)?
• Register new domains regularly to get new IPs
• Botnets compromised computers to send spam on
  behalf of the spammers

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Anti-spam vs. Spam

• Keyword detection with OCR text is derived from
  image for filtering.
• Fuzzy images making OCR compute intensive
• No mail policy completely eliminate email and
  replace it with online forms.

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Current trends

• Attachments message sent as PDF or Excel
  documents (users typically open attachment to
  find out it's a spam)?
• Some but not all anti-spam software can scan
  documents
• Packaged in zip file another level of
  complexity for anti-spam software

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Developments made to reduce spam

• Dedicated system to filter spam before reaching
  the corporate mail server
• Firewall
• NetIQs MailMarshal for SMTP
• Mail server
• Software and online email
• Gmail
• MS Outlook

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MailMarshal for SMTP
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MailMarshal for SMTP

• SMTP
• Simple and do not offer any security
• Security at enterprise level
• Centralized and easy to manage
• Filters email before it reaches mail server
• Transparent to end users
• Multilayer detection and management

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MailMarshal for SMTP

• Uses extensive array of anti-spam technologies
• Message header analysis,
• Email host blacklists,
• Domain or user blacklists,
• Domain or user whitelists,
• Anti-spoofing,
• etc
• Message is processed at each layer and decision
  is made (filter or process at next layer)

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Client software and online email

• Email software MS Outlook
• Rules can be applied to set filters
• Rules are synchronized with server
• Online email Gmail
• OCR (Optical Character Recognition)
• Authentication systems
• SPF (sender policy framework),
• DomainKeys, etc

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Future of Spam

• Spammers are ahead of anti-spam measures
• Spam keeps on changing
• Laws and regulations are made, but spammers use
  ISP in foreign nations
• Email fees free up to certain number ?
• Internet users are growing, so the spam will grow
  too

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Questions?

• Thank you!!!