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Spam Levels Up by 80% |
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The inside story on Junk Mail |
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Image-based spam
"There are enormous amounts of spam; it's shot up like crazy since the beginning of October," says John Levine, president of consulting firm Taughannock Networks and co-chair of the Internet Research Task Force's Anti-Spam Research Group, which operates a number of e-mail addresses that aren't filtered for spam. "Earlier this year I was seeing about 50,000 spam messages a day, now I'm seeing 100,000." What's to Blame? Levine's assumption is that this spike in the spam level is a result of a new generation of viruses and zombies that can infect PCs more quickly and are harder to get rid of. In its October report, messaging security vendor MessageLabs says the spike is largely due to two Trojan horses, Warezov and Spam Thru. Others say a new breed of spam messages called “image spam--messages” send text embedded in an image file that evades spam filters, which can't recognize the words inside the image. Image Spam Headaches What's made image spam so vexing is that spammers have learned to represent words in an image that are recognizable to the human eye because of the way people recognize images that a computer can't understand, says Andrew Graydon, CTO of BorderWare. "They're banking on eye recognition, and so many of the solutions out there only deal with text analysis," says Graydon. The company's new technology, set to be unveiled next week, analyzes image spam and comes up with a characterization of the message that tracks 30 different pieces of information about it that mimic the way people visualize. Of course, as vendors come up with new techniques, spammers do, too. Image spam began popping up a few months ago, and security vendors responded with products that create a "fingerprint" of the message and match that against new incoming messages. Then spammers began randomizing image spam so that each message was slightly different from the last, therefore evading fingerprinting technology. "On a scale of one to ten, I would rate image spam as an eight" in terms of how troublesome it is, says Paul Judge, CTO of Secure Computing. "This is because spammers have leapfrogged from hiding text within other text to now moving it to a place that is unreachable by most antispam systems."
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