Beating the bots (Image: Felix Möckel/iStock)

SPAMMERS’ own trickery has been used to develop an “effectively perfect” method for blocking the most common kind of spam, a team of computer scientists claims.

Most of the billions of spam messages sent each day originate in networks of compromised computers, called botnets. Unbeknown to their owners, the machines quietly run malicious software in the background that pumps out spam.

Researchers have now come up with a system that deciphers the templates a botnet is using to create spam. These templates are then used to teach spam filters what to look for. …