Abstract
In this chapter, we demonstrate a vulnerability in existing content-based message filtering methods, showing how an attacker can use a simple obfuscator to modify any message to a homograph version of the same message, thereby avoiding digest and signature based detection methods. We measure the success of this potential attack, showing a total success against Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo mail. While the attack is bothersome both in terms of its simplicity and its success, it is also easily countered. We describe some computationally practical countermeasures.
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Notes
- 1.
This, of course, should only be done to emails that “appear as Latin-character emails”—for emails appearing to be written in Cyrillic, but containing some Latin characters, the mapping would have to be made from Latin to Cyrillic.
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© 2016 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Dhiman, M., Yen, TF., Jakobsson, M. (2016). Obfuscation in Spam and Scam. In: Jakobsson, M. (eds) Understanding Social Engineering Based Scams. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-6457-4_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-6457-4_6
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4939-6455-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-4939-6457-4
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