Hands-On Artificial Intelligence for Cybersecurity

Image spam detection with SVMs

The versatility of the SVM algorithm allows us to deal with even more complex real-world classification cases, such as in the case of spam messages represented by images, instead of simple text.

As we have seen, spammers are well aware of our detection attempts, and therefore try to adopt all possible solutions to deceive our filters. One of the evasion strategies is to use images as a vehicle for spreading spam, instead of simple text.

For some time, however, viable image-based spam detection solutions have been available. Among these, we can distinguish detection strategies based on the following:

• Content-based filtering: The approach consists of trying to identify the suspect keywords that are most commonly ...