Artificial intelligence in spam
Many security professionals fear that spammers will develop more and more new techniques in the future that will also use the achievements of artificial intelligence.
Forrester Research has voiced its concern that spammers are working on newer methods to get around the various protection tools as effectively as possible. Security experts say spammers will increasingly turn to artificial intelligence to deactivate antispam technologies.
One of the biggest challenges in protecting against spam is to filter out various image-based spam. These growing numbers of emails often contain only one image at a time, so spam protection technologies based on text message scanning become ineffective in these cases. However, according to Forrester Research, image-based spam will only be the tip of the iceberg as the use of artificial intelligence spreads. Security experts cited the CAPTCHA and similar technologies as examples. For a CAPTCHA, the user must enter text in a small image before performing a web operation. This method can reduce the problems posed by robots roaming the Internet, but these techniques can also be used by spammers for their own benefit. Dr. Chenxi Wang, a leading figure in spam research, said that various optical character recognition technologies can be used in spam filters, but that only a fraction of spam distributed through artificial intelligence can be filtered out. Emails that contain images that can be read in distorted text messages are still in vogue today. In the future, the spread of letters containing audio and video files should also be expected.
Postini, which filters out millions of spam a day, says the number of spam could soon reach a new high. The company claims that the antispam technologies it uses can filter out 99 percent of unwanted emails, but only if the user sets the filtering system to the highest sensitivity. In this case, however, it must be taken into account that the antispam technology also classifies useful messages as malicious and filters them out.
