Antispam Circumvention Technology Patented By AT&T
Telecommunications firm, AT&T has been granted a patent for technology
designed to circumvent certain types of anti-spam filter, much to the puzzlement
of industry observers. Patent No. 6,643,686, applied for by Bell Labs researcher, Robert Hall in December
1999, and granted on November 4, covers technology counteracting message filtering.
According to the filing, this describes: "A system and method for circumventing
schemes that use duplication detection to detect and block unsolicited e-mail
(spam.) An address on a list is assigned to one of m sublists, where m is an
integer that is greater than one. A set of m different messages are created.
A different message from the set of m different messages is sent to the addresses
on each sublist. In this way, spam countermeasures based upon duplicate detection
schemes are foiled." This means that a spam filter which compares e-mails with known spam could
be effectively fooled, as no two messages would be the same. The move has baffled many within the industry, who cannot understand why AT&T
would need to own the rights to such technology. However, speaking to Cnet News, AT&T spokesman, Michael Dickman explained
that: "This is an arms race and (Robert Hall) tried to stay one step ahead of
the spammers. He anticipated that spammers would try to change the message to
circumvent the filters." .
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