MPhil Thesis Defence


"A Learning Approach to Spam Detection based on Social Networks"

By

Mr. Ho-Yu Lam


Abstract

The massive increase of spam is posing a very serious threat to email
which has become an important means of communication. Not only does it
annoy users, it also consumes a lot of the Internet's bandwidth. This
thesis studies the problem of spam and provides a survey to the existing
and proposed preventive and technological anti-spam measures. Most spam
filters in existence are based on content analysis. While these anti-spam
tools have proven useful, they do not protect bandwidths from being wasted
and spammers are learning to bypass them via clever manipulation of the
spam content. A very different approach to spam detection is based on the
behavior of email senders. In this thesis, we propose a learning approach
to spam sender detection based on features extracted from social networks
constructed from email exchange logs. Legitimacy scores are assigned to
senders based on their likelihood of being a legitimate sender. Three
potential spam mitigation schemes are also explored.


Date:				Tuesday, 14 August 2007

Time:				2:00p.m.-4:00p.m.

Venue:				Room 3416
				Lifts 17-18

Committee Members:		Dr. Dit-Yan Yeung (Supervisor)
				Dr. Shing-Chi Cheung (Chairperson)
				Dr. Brian Mak


**** ALL are Welcome ****