Hands-On Artificial Intelligence for Cybersecurity

Spam filters in a nutshell

To understand the tasks performed by a spam filter, let's look at an example. Imagine separating the emails we receive, categorizing them based on the presence or the absence of particular keywords occurring within the text of the emails with a certain frequency. To this end, we could list all the messages we receive in our inbox within a table. But how will we proceed with classifying our messages as ham or spam?

As we said, we will look for the number of occurrences of the suspicious keywords within the text of the email messages. We will then assign a score to the individual messages identified as spam, based on the number of occurrences of identified keywords. This score will also provide us with a reference ...