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How does spam get past searches and filters?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2024
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Without getting too technical, it possible to write letters tbat look english but they are not. Tris technique is used to evade spam filters. Try copying the word directly from email subject and do search
There is a really well known homograph where they say https://www.аррӏе.com/ but the A in Apple is cyrillic not ASCII.
You’d think the server-side spam filters would be set up to catch that. Why mix two alphabets in a URL other than to do something slimy?
Because it all comes in as Unicode.
It's the server doing the meddling, don't forget that! Email servers have two things to base an analysis off of: the trustworthyness of the senders header data and the content.
Header analysis will quickly kill messages from the fake servers but only after a certain amount of spam is identified - the computer doesn't "read" the alphabet, it just sees valid encoded symbols. It's the humans job to find the traffic lights, so to say.
And content analysis is a cold war of attrition: building better filters leads to better tricks leads to better filters, etc.
The only way I have found to stay spam free is customizing my address for each potential sender (i.e. scipilemmy@mydomain.net).that was a lot of work to set up though...