Spam is one of the things about the Internet that I hate. There's nothing worse than having to weed your way through mail after mail offering you Viagra, genital extension creams and pictures of Brittney Spears naked just to get to the good stuff. Companies like Microsoft and others have pledged to do something about it, and just as we seem to be getting somewhere, it looks like spam is going into the next generation.
According to the Globe and Mail, Canadian researchers have figured out a way to create spam that could bypass the best filters and trick even the most savvy computer users into opening messages they would normally delete.
This new generation of spam utilises hijacked machines to send mail that appears to be legit. In fact, the mail can appear to be from someone that you really know, when in fact it's from a spammer.
John Aycock, a computer scientist at the University of Calgary, was quoted as saying, "It's very much an arms race between the good guys and the bad guys."
"What we've been trying to do here at the university is look ahead at this arms race, try to figure out what's coming down the road and how we can build defenses for it now, said Aycock."