An In-depth Analysis of Spam and Spammers

Electronic mail services have become an important source of communication for millions of people all over the world. Due to this tremendous growth, there has been a significant increase in spam traffic. Spam messes up user's inbox, consumes network resources and spread worms and viruses. In this paper we study the characteristics of spam and the technology used by spammers. In order to counter anti spam technology, spammers change their mode of operation, therefore continues evaluation of the characteristics of spam and spammers technology has become mandatory. These evaluations help us to enhance the existing anti spam technology and thereby help us to combat spam effectively. In order to characterize spam, we collected four hundred thousand spam mails from a corporate mail server for a period of 14 months from January 2006 to February 2007. For analysis we classified spam based on attachment and contents. We observed that spammers use software tools to send spam with attachment...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: CORR
• Authors: Dhinaharan Nagamalai, Beatrice Cynthia Dhinakaran, Jae-Kwang Lee
• Keywords: Anti Spam Technology, CORR 2010, Education, Old Light Users, Spam Traffic