Computer systems play an important role in the life of the modern man. In contemporary society, hardly anyone can say that they could easily get by without a personal computer, notebook or smart phone. Various computer systems are used at home, at the factory and in the office. A significant share of all work is done using computers.
Taking into account the full significance that computer systems have in people's lives in supporting their habitual mode of existence, the number of hackers is on the rise whose activity is devoted to creating program applications representing a threat to computer systems. One of the most widespread examples of hacker activity is organizing the sending out of spam.
Spam is an anonymous, unwanted, mass sending e-mail. A variety of spam that is recently growing in popularity is the SMS messages containing commercial and other offers that are sent without the consent of the user. As a rule, spam is of an advertising nature, and so for the most part it does not constitute a threat to the computer systems of users. The exception is spam having a harmful content. Such electronic messages containing harmful attachments can present a threat to the data present in the computer.
Nevertheless, even if the spam messages are not harmful and only bear the nature of advertising, they often present certain inconveniences. One such inconvenience is “cluttering” of the computer user's mail, when the user may easily overlook an important message in the flow of numerous spam messages. What is more, spam messages take up a substantial volume of the e-mail traffic. For example, the share of spam includes more than 70% of global mail traffic. The spam messages accumulate in user mail boxes and take time to clean out. One should also consider that among the spam messages there are messages which lead to phishing resources that can be a cause of theft of passwords and personal data.
Present methods of spam detection, which typically involve grouping of messages by various criteria, often result in false positives, i.e., when the spam message ends up in the group of legitimate messages or when the legitimate message is grouped as spam.
Therefore, there is a need for spam detection method that minimizes the number of false positives and consequently maximizes the degree of protection against spam.