Google Says Spam, Virus Attacks to Get More Clever

eweekhickins writes "Google's Postini team says new attacks will take the form of sneaky viruses that will blend with spam, leveraging specific current events, such as the Super Bowl or the Summer Olympic Games. Better yet, virus attacks will target executives at companies whose intellectual property is deemed valuable on the black market. A lot of these attacks will masquerade as legitimate business agencies, such as the Internal Revenue Service, the Better Business Bureau and the SEC."

Crims get more entrepreneurial

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Who's suprised that the crims get more clever about the way they craft their attacks? As it gets harder to fool people with fake Viagra ads and bank phishing and other lower hanging fruit, it makes sense to start putting more effort into targeting the bigger prizes. More effort sure, but better prizes too.

Crims have always been good at adapting and exploiting conditions. The Mafia really got their power due to exploiting the prohibition. Cable thieves in South Africa are using rolling blackout schedules to plan their cable thefts.

As more business services are done online it makes sense to phish for more than some lame paypal accounts.

Google? Don't you just mean Postini?

[Raindance]

Postini's a relatively recent Google acquisition. I'm not sure it's fair to say "Google this" and "Google that" when the agreement to acquire Postini is less than a year old. The spokesperson was probably just speaking for their own team and from their own culture.

Wait, isn't this already the case?

[grasshoppa]

We already see this behavior. Phishing anybody? How many of us get "BRITTAANNYIES OUT LATE NIGHT PARTYING" emails?

Like a firehose....

[PGillingwater]

I use Gmail for one of my email accounts, and have used this address (without obfuscation) on the Internet for eight years or so. Therefore, I get a lot of spam. Recently, I've noticed more and more getting through Google's spam filters lately.... but what really amazes me is the volume.

Here's a simple example: most Gmail users know they have a Spam folder, into which Gmail transfers any messages which appear "spammy." This works pretty well, and I keep around 30 days worth in there, as I used to occasionally look through for false positives (which happened sometimes.)

The problem now is just that there is too much spam to do this. Let's compare: here is the count of spam in ONE Gmail account, for the past 30 days -- can anyone match it?

Spam (84194)

I figure that's a rate of 2,800 per day, or 116 per hour. Nearly two spam messages, every minute, 24x7.... and most of it consists of duplicates. Why are the spammers doing this? Unless they are paid per message they send, I don't see it improving their chances of getting a message past filters.

Re:What happened to "Bayesian Filters"...

[Plutonite]

The geeks discovered that Bayesian filters do a reasonable learning job, but like all simple things in AI, fail the Turing test? To be fair, detecting SPAM is objectively less difficult than deciding on "humanness" because of the nature of email. While it is a very hard problem, Google and many other mail servers have recently become very proficient at spam blocking, but not perfect.

In conclusion: whenever you hear the word "totally solve" being associated with anything involving uncertain/probabilistic reasoning, you are probably being lied to.