Spam is undoubtedly the greatest evil of the internet and the worst part is that it grows exponentially with the super fast growth of the internet. A team of computer scientists has now come up with a brilliant idea to fight spam – use the spammer’s tricks to counter spam. The idea is simple – decipher the templates being used for creating spam and then feed the intelligence of these templates into spam filters. Since each bot uses the same spam template to generate bulk spam, deciphering the spam filter will help recognize all spam originating from the bot.

The International Computer Science Institute, Berkley, California and University of California, San Diego collaborated to implement and test this idea. The results so far have been mighty impressive – No False Positives and Super Quick Processing of messages. This is an ongoing research and will be presented at the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium in San Diego in March, 2010.

Pretty neat – if you can’t kill Spam with your own hands, kill it with the Spammer’s help!