International Journal of Communications,... > Vol.8 No.5, May 2015

Jafar Alqatawna^*, Hossam Faris, Khalid Jaradat, Malek Al-Zewairi, Omar Adwan

King Abdullah II School for Information Technology, The University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan.

Spam is no longer just commercial unsolicited email messages that waste our time, it consumes network traffic and mail servers’ storage. Furthermore, spam has become a major component of several attack vectors including attacks such as phishing, cross-site scripting, cross-site request forgery and malware infection. Statistics show that the amount of spam containing malicious contents increased compared to the one advertising legitimate products and services. In this paper, the issue of spam detection is investigated with the aim to develop an efficient method to identify spam email based on the analysis of the content of email messages. We identify a set of features that have a considerable number of malicious related features. Our goal is to study the effect of these features in helping the classical classifiers in identifying spam emails. To make the problem more challenging, we developed spam classification models based on imbalanced data where spam emails form the rare class with only 16.5% of the total emails. Different metrics were utilized in the evaluation of the developed models. Results show noticeable improvement of spam classification models when trained by dataset that includes malicious related features.

Spam E-Mail, Malicious Spam, Spam Detection, Spam Features, Security Mechanism, Data Mining

Alqatawna, J. , Faris, H. , Jaradat, K. , Al-Zewairi, M. and Adwan, O. (2015) Improving Knowledge Based Spam Detection Methods: The Effect of Malicious Related Features in Imbalance Data Distribution. International Journal of Communications, Network and System Sciences, 8, 118-129. doi: 10.4236/ijcns.2015.85014.