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posted by hubie on Sunday April 13, @08:35PM   Printer-friendly
from the I-stand-above-the-rest! dept.

Marketing professionals are always looking for that "edge" that gets them noticed instead of automatically being kicked out by spam filters which were put in place specifically to handle exactly what they are doing.

Here is how AI is learning about individual targets in order to craft specifically worded unique business communication designed to appeal to maybe even one decision-maker in a corporate environment.

https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/04/openais-gpt-helps-spammers-send-blast-of-80000-messages-that-bypassed-filters/

Spammers used OpenAI to generate messages that were unique to each recipient, allowing them to bypass spam-detection filters and blast unwanted messages to more than 80,000 websites in four months, researchers said Wednesday.

The finding, documented in a post published by security firm SentinelOne's SentinelLabs, underscores the double-edged sword wielded by large language models. The same thing that makes them useful for benign tasks—the breadth of data available to them and their ability to use it to generate content at scale—can often be used in malicious activities just as easily. OpenAI revoked the spammers' account in February.

The spam blast is the work of AkiraBot—a framework that automates the sending of messages in large quantities to promote shady search optimization services to small- and medium-size websites. AkiraBot used python-based scripts to rotate the domain names advertised in the messages. It also used OpenAI's chat API tied to the model gpt-4o-mini to generate unique messages customized to each site it spammed, a technique that likely helped it bypass filters that look for and block identical content sent to large numbers of sites. The messages are delivered through contact forms and live chat widgets embedded into the targeted websites.

"AkiraBot's use of LLM-generated spam message content demonstrates the emerging challenges that AI poses to defending websites against spam attacks," SentinelLabs researchers Alex Delamotte and Jim Walter wrote. "The easiest indicators to block are the rotating set of domains used to sell the Akira and ServiceWrap SEO offerings, as there is no longer a consistent approach in the spam message contents as there were with previous campaigns selling the services of these firms."

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    Right now, I can toss email and phone threat communications from "toll-road authorities" who claim I violated their automated tolling machine. It seems all the evidence one needs to "prove" another's "guilt" is an accusation followed by publicly available "evidence" curated for this specific attack.

However, if they have to involve the United States Postal Service (USPS) , it's a felony.

https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/crime-penalties/federal/Federal-mail-fraud.htm


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by HiThere on Sunday April 13, @10:57PM (2 children)

    by HiThere (866) on Sunday April 13, @10:57PM (#1400133) Journal

    I gave up on spam filters long ago. So what I did instead was create filters that would select things I probably want, and file it by category in a bunch of different folders. What's in the inbox that isn't specifically recognized as "I built a filter to pull this out" is just ignored. And I've got to admit that frequently even many of the categories that I specifically pull out are ignored. Several of them are just kept in case I need to go digging for "now where did/would I find someone telling me how to do that".

    --
    Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
    Starting Score:    1  point
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  • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday April 14, @06:41PM

    by Freeman (732) on Monday April 14, @06:41PM (#1400221) Journal

    I tried something similar. Now, I essentially just ignore everything. Seems to work fine for me. That said, work e-mail is barely organized, but checked frequently. So it doesn't really matter there either. For my personal e-mail, if I don't read it when it hits the inbox and/or I am expecting the thing. It doesn't get read.

    --
    Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 15, @03:44AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 15, @03:44AM (#1400257)
    Currently we are using gpt4o to assign a spamminess score to stuff submitted by our "contact form". The contact form already blocks most automated/bot stuff - so the AI usage is not going to cost us a significant amount per month.

    So far I agree with gpt4o's scores. I don't agree as much with the scores from Deepseek R1/V3 and Llama.