Blocking Spam in 2022

welcome back to the seminar i'll give you a moment to take your seats

while you do that kim will be handing out printouts of the slides for this session

we'll also make the slides available for download for those who prefer a digital version so in this

portion of the seminar we'll be looking at strategies to stop the latest spam techniques

like every company we've seen a lot of spam over the past 20 years it seems the problem is getting

worse every year despite all the legislation and it is coming from everywhere for example i'm not

sure why but we've been getting a lot of spam from germany lately up to 20 emails per day per

account promoting well let's just say adult oriented services every single day non-stop and

we've had enough

so the good thing is that the german language contains some unique characters not found in

other languages so this actually helped us understand the problem and develop a response

very quickly the uh the regular filters and spam blocking techniques did not initially work

suspect that the spammers had anticipated those moves and created their messages accordingly so

the spam kept pouring in as a result we have to refine our response and so far the results have

been high and we've been getting a lot of spam and we've been getting a lot of spam and we've

been getting a lot of spam and we've been getting a lot of spam and we've been getting a lot of spam

and the spam is now 100 effective and can be used by anyone on advanced networks and clients apps

as well as non-advanced software so it's very useful if you use standard email software like

mail on a mac or outlook this will work for you as well so normally to stop adult themed spam

you would simply define rules to stop emails containing certain graphic terms from being

delivered if the message contains the term boom it is the same with spam you can find machine language

deleted by the server or the app easy enough so what we did is we translated a

few keywords in German updated the filter rules and voila well not exactly

the spam kept getting through the text-based rules did not work which was

very strange it turns out they were not enough because some messages were HTML

messages which meant that spelling a word using the Roman alphabet did not

work all the time we had to ensure that the corresponding HTML entity was also

included in the filter rules and I'll give you an example I don't speak German

so I'll use the word voila as the term we want to use as a flag in the filters

so the rules must include both the Roman alphabet version as well as its HTML

based entity so in this case you would have voila

spelled with an R was also included in the filter rules and this was not the

roman alphabet and voila with the agrav html entity in the filters and i'll put a link up

so that you can find out all the different html entities corresponding to

specific characters in the alphabet but for the german spammers that was not enough and spam kept

flooding in as we looked at the source code we noticed that for some messages they were encoding

the source code as base 64 code so the result was perfectly displayed by the email applications

the filters could not stop the flags because they were encoded and did not aspire as voila

or the html version voila a grave so in fact this showed up as i'll put up two

two examples on the screen of the base 64 code version of the words

okay here it is and for um help on that on how you can encode the terms you want to use as filters

you can type simply base64 encode in your favorite search engines annual access and online tools that

allows you to do that so you'll type in the word voila it will give you its um it's a base 64

version and voila a grave it will give you that version as well so after updating each filter

you can see that it's been encoded as well

right now you can see that the first one is the html version of the word voila

and then after encoding the code you can see that it's still a base 64 version

the html version is the html version of the word voila and you can see that it's still a base 64

version so when we put the filter rules to include the base 64 code of the flags we ended up

with four flags for each term so you have the roman alphabet type which is your initial starting

point voila then you move into the html version which would be the voila a grave

HTML version, so you encode base64, the second line that you have on the screen, and it becomes

the fourth line.

So you have all four terms that you include in the filters, you have to use all four versions,

sounds more complicated than it is, but that worked, it outsmarted spammers for now.

So let me see if you have any questions about that, we'll try out a few examples now.

You mentioned the Roman alphabet, will this work with other languages as well, like Asian

languages, so on and so forth?

OK for those of you online, the question is will this work for non-Roman languages, yes

it will, you can take Japanese and Chinese words and encode them in base64 and that will

work as well, so it's quite universal in nature.

It's a huge gain, not only for the hamburger also, but also for other languages too.

And then for Kansas too, I mentioned earlier, um, that you can have these after the script

highlights.

Should you turn off the subtitles, it will turn back to black, you can also also turn

on the subtitles on theする.

You can also turn on some of the subtitles but sometimes someologne only works.

So you can add some over there.

I'm starting to have some of them on right now.

Let's see.

Thank you.