The Evolutionary Microcosm of Stock Spam
Adam J. O'Donnell · IEEE Security & Privacy · 2007
Spam is a form of advertisement. Through the years, spammers have tried to entice us to purchase a wide variety of gray market products, including pharmaceuticals without prescriptions, pornography without taste, master's degrees with substandard credentials, and mortgages with subprime rates. The messages have become so standardized that both spammers and spam fighters treat the mail sender, the pitch, and the contact information separately, applying different mutation and detection methods to each field. The underlying assumption on both sides of the conflict has been that spam would advertise both a product and a place to purchase that product, allowing spam sponsors to make money