Researchers at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkley, California, and the University of California, San Diego have developed an “effectively perfect” method for blocking SPAM sent via Botnets.

Botnets are large networks of compromised computers which run malicious software in the background, pumping out thousands of SPAM messages unbeknown to the owners.

“The system works by exploiting a trick that spammers use to defeat email filters. As spam is churned out, subtle changes are typically incorporated into the messages to confound spam filters. Each message is generated from a template that specifies the message content and how it should be varied. The team reasoned that analysing such messages could reveal the template that created them. And since the spam template describes the entire range of the emails a bot will send, possessing it might provide a watertight method of blocking spam from that bot.”

To test their strategy, the team installed a previously catpured botnet onto a machine in their posession. They monitored outbound traffic and analyzed approimately 1000 spam messages—less than 10 minutes’ work for most bots—then reverse engineered the template.

“Knowledge of that template then enabled filters to block further spam from that bot with 100 per cent accuracy.”

Read the full article from NewsScientist