back to article Security rEsrchRs find nu way 2 spot TXT spam

Symantec boffins reckon it's no longer enough to shield e-mail users from malicious email and that spam and phishing over SMS are now worthy of some decent defences. They've even penned a study to back up the proposition, suggesting that SMS spam could be 97 per cent detectable with a false positive rate as low as 0.02 per cent …

  1. brooxta

    Punters

    Did the cellco concerned get permission from all the customers concerned before using their private non-spam messages in this research?

    1. ChrisS4

      Re: Punters

      They say they added tweets to simulate clean SMS data. Well done!

      1. brooxta

        Re: Punters

        @ChrisS4

        They say they added tweets to simulate clean SMS data. Well done!

        They cleaned up 200,000 tweets to act as an additional source of non-spam. That is additional to the non-spam they harvested from the cellco's network.

    2. This post has been deleted by its author

  2. Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

    clustered substring tokens

    What, like "PPI" ?

  3. Shannon Jacobs
    Holmes

    Why dost thou spam?

    Hint: Not just because you're a sociopath. It's because thou art a sociopath and making money from the spam.

    I'm not saying we can cure them. I'm saying we can attack their business models so they get less money and they will send less spam. Symantec is the wrong locus of an economic attack because their business model depends on the visibility of spammers, scammers, black-hat hackers, and various other free advertising.

    The companies that have the business model that is directly related to the value of email OUGHT to be the email providers like Yahoo (hopelessly incompetent), Gmail (EVIL), and Microsoft (new spots on an old leopard?). They all pretend to hate spam, but none of them are sincere about it. If they were, then they would offer integrated anti-spam tools so we could help attack ALL of the spammers' infrastructure, pursue ALL of the spammers' accomplices, and protect ALL of the spammers' victims, even from themselves.

    The suckers that feed the spammers are a very precious and limited resource. That's why the spammers send out billions of pieces of carp (polite fudge) to tap them. If it were easier for the wannabe good Samaritans who hate spam to get in the middle, then we could completely overwhelm the limited supply of suckers. Let's stop the spammers from feeding, eh?

  4. ChrisS4

    Very timely published paper, just one day after celebrities phones got hacked. Maybe it was via an innocent SMS spam?

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like