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Abstract
In the pursuit of an effective spam detection system, the focus has often
been on identifying known spam patterns either through rule-based detection
systems or machine learning (ML) solutions that rely on keywords. However, both
systems are susceptible to evasion techniques and zero-day attacks that can be
achieved at low cost. Therefore, an email that bypassed the defense system once
can do it again in the following days, even though rules are updated or the ML
models are retrained. The recurrence of failures to detect emails that exhibit
layout similarities to previously undetected spam is concerning for customers
and can erode their trust in a company. Our observations show that threat
actors reuse email kits extensively and can bypass detection with little
effort, for example, by making changes to the content of emails. In this work,
we propose an email visual similarity detection approach, named Pisco, to
improve the detection capabilities of an email threat defense system. We apply
our proof of concept to some real-world samples received from different
sources. Our results show that email kits are being reused extensively and
visually similar emails are sent to our customers at various time intervals.
Therefore, this method could be very helpful in situations where detection
engines that rely on textual features and keywords are bypassed, an occurrence
our observations show happens frequently.
External Datasets
emails received from different sources in our corpus