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Image Spam Goes Boom
David Utter
Staff Writer
2007-01-17
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
Spammers switched tactics with millions of junk messages by sending them as images instead of text, and that exploded to account for a huge portion of all spam sent in 2006.
 | | Image Spam Goes Boom |  |
They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, and no one took that aphorism to heart more than the criminals who plague millions of email users around the globe. Pump and dump stock scams that used to arrived as plain text now drop into inboxes as images instead.
The reason for this, according to McAfee's Nick Kelly, is the increasing effectiveness of spam filtering technology. He noted the jarring increase in image spam as a response to antispam technology.
Techniques like Bayesian filtering can learn to recognize text-based spam. As technologies using those filters became more common, the spammers began having difficulty delivering their scams. Then they began to adapt:
This type of spam started to increase in complexity and volume, and by the start of 2006 image spam accounted for up to 30% of all spam. By October image spam had increased up to 40% of all spam and by the end of 2006 image spam accounted for up to 65% of all spam. With a 100% increase in image spam, which is typically 3-4 times the size of text based spam, there must have been a lot of extra junk clogging up the tubes of the internet last year.
Security companies began adjusting their software to detect image spam. The spammers countered by obfuscating the text in those images to foil OCR scanning, Kelly wrote.
Criminals behind image spam have moved beyond stock scams, offering the usual drug and fake software come-ons common to spam messages. Like text-based messages, they depend on action by the recipient to make them profitable.
While antispam companies continually improve their products to foil image spam and other junk mail, criminals will evolve as well. Consumers online need to evolve and stop making purveyors of easy money schemes rich. Spam would not be as much of a problem if it did not offer such moneymaking potential to those who back it.
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Tag: Image Spam
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About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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