On Sun, Feb 14, 2021 at 4:45 PM John Hardin <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> On Sun, 14 Feb 2021, Ricky Boone wrote:
>
> > What are the community's thoughts on handling spam/phishing that utilize
> > homoglyphs to obfuscate the brands they're targeting?  Are there any
> > plugins that are in development that might assist with catching these?
>
> Take a look at the definition of the FUZZY rules.
>
> There's no general plugin for this currently. That would be a bit
> difficult to do on-the-fly without getting (potentially lots of) FPs on
> non-English words.
>
> At the moment it's:
>
> 1) notice that some word is being obfuscated
> 2) add a FUZZY rule for that word
> 3) tune it for FPs (may hit legitimate words in non-English, exclude them)

Good to know.  I'll check out the FUZZY rules for possible rules in the future.

> The problem is such obfuscations may not be common enough in the masscheck
> corpora for the rules to be promoted, scored and published.

Understood.  There may be better rules that could be built with
additional context other than just the individual words/phrases.  If
there is interest in the original messages, I can make sanitized
versions available.

> > For example, here are some phrases that I've been monitoring from reported
> > messages:
> >
> > * that Âmåzon has received
> > * Äpple Watch
> > * Ãρρle iPad
> > * Aρρle iPad
> > * PäyPäl Credit
> > * PαyPαl Credit
> > * Spãce Gray
> > * to Over Støck Inc on
> > * subscribed for Nõrtõn Yearly
> > * subscribed for Nõrtøn Yearly
> > * the Nõrtõn Freedom Protection
> >
> > Existing rules (mainline SpamAssassin channel, KAM, etc.) don't seem to
> > flag much, if anything substantial, on the messages I've seen with this
> > behavior.  I've trained bayes on each, and created a custom set of rules to
> > try to catch various patterns used in the messages.
>
> I've added FUZZY rules for amazon, apple, microsoft, facebook, paypal and
> norton to my sandbox, they are likely going to be fairly commonB.
>
> How often do you see (over)stock and space obfuscated?

So far, 4 times and once, respectively, the latter in context was
describing a version of an Apple iPad, so full product names must have
been used for the input to whatever homoglyph generating process the
spammers were using.

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