This is the first book of its kind to document the detailed
application of forensic analysis techniques to the field of e-mail
security. Both investigative and preventative techniques are
described but the focus is on prevention.
The world has been subjected to an increasing wave of spam and
more recently, scamming and phishing attacks in the last twenty
years. Such attacks now include industrial espionage and
government-sponsored spying. The volume and sophistication of such
attacks has rendered existing technologies only partially effective
leaving the end-user vulnerable and the number of successful
attacks is increasing.
The seeds of this book were sown three years ago when the
author, a Professor of Forensic Software Engineering, was trying to
recover his 20 year-old e-mail address from the clutches of
spammers who had rendered it almost unusable with more than 140,000
junk messages a day. It got to the point where he was invited by
his ISP to either change it or take it elsewhere. Instead he
decided to find out how to prevent the deluge, acquired his own
servers and began researching.
The book is a mixture of analysis, experiment and implementation
in almost equal proportions with detailed description of the
defence in depth necessary to turn the tidal wave of junk aside
leaving only what the end user wants to see - no more and no less.
It covers: -
- 1. The rise of e-mail
- 2. How it all works
- 3. Scams, spam and other abuse
- 4. Protection: the principles of filtering
- 5. Going deeper: setting up a mail server
- 6. Advanced content filtering
- 7. The bottom line - how well can we do ?
- 8. Where is all this going ?
There is something here for everyone. Chapters 1-4 are suitable for
the general reader who just wants to understand how spammers and
scammers work and find out a little more about the many forms of
attack. Chapters 5 and 6 are highly technical and suitable for both
e-mail administrators and theoreticians and include a discussion of
the latest computational and mathematical techniques for detecting
textual patterns. Chapter 7 presents the results of applying the
techniques in this book on the several million junk messages the
author's servers received over a 10 month period. Chapter 8 tries
to see into the future a little to predict how the arms race
between the attackers and defenders might go. Finally, those
interested in governance will find discussions of the dangers of
release of e-mail addresses under Freedom of Information Requests.
The book contains many illustrations of attacks and is supported
by numerous code examples in Perl and C.
Perfection is impossible, but if you follow the advice in this
book, you can build mail systems which provably make no more than 5
mistakes per million messages received, very close to the
definitive manufacturing standard of six sigma. The threat from
viruses effectively disappears and the e-mail user is secured from
toxic content.
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