I know that I've been getting a lot of image spam lately. Fortunately I have a spam filter that let's me delete them before downloading (or report them to Spamcop).
Image spam increases 200 per cent over last five months
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When anti-spam technology creates a roadblock for spam, the spammers find a way to circumvent that roadblock. Since most anti-spam technologies are based on content filtering of text, spammers have recently been turning to image-based spam. According to Secure Computing, the amount of image spam has increased 200 per cent over the last few months.
A year ago, image spam consisted of approximately two per cent of the total amount of spam moving through cyberspace, but the amount of image spam has skyrocketed over the last four or five months, said Paul Judge, CTO of Secure Computing. Image spam now accounts for 30 per cent of all spam on the Internet.
"The reason is spammers have found a hole in the system. They've found a weakness and are working diligently to exploit it," Judge said.
Since traditional anti-spam technologies look at the text in an e-mail and judge whether it's spam or not based on the filtering of that text, many anti-spam products are not catching image-based spam. The text is an image, so they're missing it, Judge said. (continued) |
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