Camouflages and Token Manipulations-The Changing Faces of the Nigerian Fraudulent 419 Spammers

摘要

The inefficiencies of current spam filters against fraudulent (419) mails is not unrelated to the use by spammers of good-wordattacks, topic drifts, parasitic spamming, wrong categorization and recategorization of electronic mails by e-mail clients and ofcourse the fuzzy factors of greed and gullibility on the part of the recipients who responds to fraudulent spam mail offers. In thispaper, we establish that mail token manipulations remain, above any other tactics, the most potent tool used by Nigerianscammers to fool statistical spam filters. While hoping that the uncovering of these manipulative evidences will prove useful infuture antispam research, our findings also sensitize spam filter developers on the need to inculcate within their antispamarchitecture robust modules that can deal with the identified camouflages.