Suggested phishing net tuning (more examples)

[Julian Field]

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I have worked in checks for these and also for mailto links. Please keep
providing the feedback, this is by nature a very fuzzy matching system
and it will take time to perfect it.

Quentin Campbell wrote:

>Julian
>
>A difficult false positive example is:
>
>Nov 19 04:15:18 cheviot5 MailScanner[14191]: Found phishing fraud from
>support at pegasusworks.com?subject=unsubscriberequest for j.bloggs at ncl.ac.uk
>claiming to be emailsupport at pegasusworks.com
>
>Is it impossible to parse this safely before comparing the strings?
>
>A more common type of false positive is:
>
>Nov 19 05:51:14 cheviot5 MailScanner[14163]: Found phishing fraud from
>www.worldonaplate.com claiming to be worldonaplate.com
>
>I can see why you might be unwilling to remove the "www." from the actual
>link before doing the comparison but is it really that unsafe?
>
>What is a good and useful feature still has a false positive rate that is
>unacceptably high.
>
>Could your editing of the strings in the hypertext link be done more
>aggressively before comparison? I know this may risk a possible rise in
>the false negative rate but there are other detectors in MailScanner which
>you acknowledge have a non-zero false negative rate.
>
>I would be willing to see the false negative rate increase slightly in
>order to reduce the number of times we cry "wolf!"
>
>Quentin
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--
Julian Field
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