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2) Spam email is always a fun topic, and one that we are all familiar with; luckily, we typically are not dealing with spam as much as we used to due to improved email services. I found an article in the Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law on the subject of how the popularity of email has led to the inevitable rise in email attacks, spamming in particular, and what is being done about it. The article discusses how spam is generally sent through malware bots, but there is an originating source of the spam, or master who is using the bots for dissemination. The originator will typically use similar characteristics in the spam emails because they will come from a particular spam template, and once those characteristics are recognized it is easier to track down the originator, and shut them down (Khan, Mizan, Hasan, & Sprague, 2014).
The University of Alabama at Birmingham has a very large Spam Data Mine that is used by organizations all over the world in an attempt to study and eradicate spam attacks. The process of linking spam characteristics to each other is referred to as clustering or spam data clustering. Clustering is very time consuming, and requires a lot of computing power due to the vast amount of spam emails is circulation. The authors of this article hope to improve the effectiveness of clustering algorithms by running the spam through a series of data sampling processes before they hit the clustering algorithms (Khan, Mizan, Hasan, & Sprague, 2014).
This is important work due to the steady rise in internet related crime including email related crime over the past few years. Spam email can be much more than just annoying advertisements; they are being used to trick recipients into giving up personal information or money, and also to infect computers with viruses and various malicious types of software that can turn their computer into a spam bot, record keystrokes, and more. Junk email is different from spam and usually is not used for sending Trojans, spyware, and worms in the way that spam is (Khan, Mizan, Hasan, & Sprague, 2014).
Understanding the enemy is very important for computer forensic specialists, and IT security specialists alike, because we have to understand the tactics being used in order to know how to defend from them, and find the source of the attack
Arun1990
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