Manipulating E-Mail Server Feedback for Spam Prevention

Abstract

The cyber criminals who infect machines with bots are not the same as the spammers who rent botnets to distribute their messages. The activities of these spammers account for the majority of spam emails traffic on the internet. Once their botnets and campaigns are identified, it is not enough to keep on filtering the spam emails, it is necessary to deploy techniques that will carry the fight to their end. It is observed that spammers also take into account server feedback (for example to detect and remove non-existent recipients from email address lists). We can take advantage of this observation by returning fake information, thereby poisoning the server feedback on which the spammers rely. The results of this paper show that by sending misleading information to a spammer, it is possible to prevent recipients from receiving subsequent spam emails from that same spammer.