Spam is a type of electronic junk mail or unwanted messaging that is sent in large quantities. It is typically unsolicited and sent to a large number of recipients without their permission. Spam can take many forms, including email, social media messages, and phone calls.
One common type of spam is email spam, which has been a problem since the early days of the internet. Email spam is often used to promote products or services, or to spread malicious content such as viruses or phishing scams. Spammers may use techniques such as spoofing, where they forge the sender’s address to make it appear legitimate, or botnets, which are networks of compromised computers that can be used to send spam en masse.
In addition to email spam, there is also spam on social media platforms, such as spammy posts or messages that promote products or services. There are also spam phone calls, which may involve automated calls that try to sell products or services or may be part of a scam.
Here at Fullworks’ Plugins our focus is WordPress and out concern therefore is comment spam, contact form spam and registration spam. In fact anything that can be input by a bot or human into a public WordPress based website.
To combat spam, there are a variety of tools and techniques that have been developed. These include antispam software, which is designed to detect and filter out spam messages, and CAPTCHAs, which are used to verify that a human is attempting to access a website or service. Blacklisting is another common tactic, where spammy websites or IP addresses are added to a list of known spam sources and blocked from.
For years, statistical analysis, typically Bayesian inference has been a weapon. Bayesian inference is a method of statistical inference in which Bayes’ theorem is used to update the probability for a hypothesis as more evidence or information becomes available. As such, when implemented in code and presented with spam and no spam data sets it it possible to infer a probability that a new text string is likely to be spam.
Recent developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) has meant it is now practical to use these techniques to infer whether a text is spam. The AI models are based on massive sets of language data and fine tuned with specific spam and non spam texts.
Spam wars continues, I’m sure spammers are using AI to generate spam, but we can use the same weapons against them.
Fullworks Plugins has a sophisticated Anti Spam Plugin for WordPress that utilises all of the above techniques to beat spam including AI NLP.
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