This discussion has some minor relevance to debian-isp, but nothing to do with debian-security. Let's move the discussion to debian-isp.
On Wed, 24 Dec 2003 00:25, Dale Amon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I've been noticing loads of mails like this lately: > > emery atrocious larval drippy elate incontrollable raster anglicanism > checkerberry feed sit ajar saturable decathlon > already climate inhibition pagoda narcissus expository toni > > I can only assume someone out there is trying to attack > bayesian systems by loading them up with all sorts of > normal words so that good mail gets false positives, thus > breaking the systems. I'm getting about 5-10 of those per day to my personal mailbox, and another 10 or more through mailing lists. I don't think it's an active attempt to poison bayesian systems, just an attempt to avoid them by making the ratio of spam-content to non-spam much lower. One technique that's being used a lot is to get books in electronic form and put a coupld of sentences in every spam (sentences from a book will pass gramatical checking etc, unlike the example you posted above). Also text from a book will have the right ratio of words, you will almost never find such a long "sentence" in an email message without a punctuation character, "and", "or", or other common words except in the case of source code (which is another category in bayesian filters). I've never done anything serious with bayesian filters. The machine that hosts my email has spamassasin doing something, but I've never investigated that (other people manage it). I manage using DNSBL, iptables, and Postfix configuration for blocking spam. -- http://www.coker.com.au/selinux/ My NSA Security Enhanced Linux packages http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++/ Bonnie++ hard drive benchmark http://www.coker.com.au/postal/ Postal SMTP/POP benchmark http://www.coker.com.au/~russell/ My home page
