Organised crime in your inbox
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iStock/Dmitry Obukhov |
A Macquarie University student’s annoyance with spam has turned into a PhD research project to create a new email architecture.
Brett Watson first became interested in spam while operating as a very small scale Internet Service Provider for a few friends.
“In doing that, you wind up facing all the problems associated with being an Internet Service Provider, and spam happens to be one of those problems,” he explains. “I had an idea for an anti-spam system and pursued it during an Honours year at the University. I have since faced more and more trouble from spammers and it’s become more and more of an interest, so after a short break I decided to pick up again at the PhD level.”
PhD research
But Watson’s PhD topic is not just about preventing spam.
“I’m also trying to improve the process of email delivery in general,” he says. “One of the big problems we have with email is that there is no authentication of identity. You can, if you know how, write an email and claim that it’s come from anyone. Most spammers falsify their ‘from’ address in this way.
“Part of what I’m trying to do is have stronger identity claims, not because I want to be able to identify the actual people that sent it, but so that we can give preferential treatment to senders with a known history of good behaviour. Receiving spam is bad enough, but losing mail that you want in a spam filter is worse. My method facilitates wanted mail, while still allowing the suspicious stuff to be subjected to closer scrutiny and filtering. Think of it as first and second class mail.”
Spam scams
Watson has been keeping a close eye on spam ever since the early days.
“The first things to be called spam were just minor irritations, just people being annoying,” he recalls. “And then you had the kooks with a message to spread – the conspiracy freaks and the ‘Jesus is coming tomorrow’ people. Then in ‘94 the first newsworthy commercially-motivated spam was sent by a group of lawyers in the US called Canter and Siegel. They were also the first people who were completely and utterly unrepentant about the fact they were spamming: they saw it as a huge opportunity. It’s been downhill from there. With the increasing number of laws to prevent people spamming as a legitimate business operation, it’s becoming increasingly sleazy and criminal in nature.”
Watson now gives very authoritative talks on spam scams to other students and academics in the Department of Computing at Macquarie, where he discusses the various types of frauds, from ‘Pump and Dump’ to phishing.
To discuss postgraduate options for cybercrime research at Macquarie University, contact Dr Paul Watters at paul.watters@mq.edu.au