Digital Journal — It’s bad enough to receive Nigerian email scams and solicitations with the subject “Stop being obese and unhappy.” Now spam is taking a graphical turn for the worse — image spam is reaching a record high, according to analysts.
IronPort Systems found that image spam’s volume has more than doubled since April. Image-based spam accounts for 21 per cent of all junk email, compared to one per cent in late 2005, IronPort said.
These spam images contain graphics of everything from Viagra to page templates to action photos. This sneaky spam technique varies the content of each message through colour, font size or picture size, so they appear distinct to spam filters. Compromised PCs, called bots, automatically send the spam to millions of companies and consumers.
Though it had been around for about four years, spammers lacked the technology to randomize images, Dmitri Alperovitch of email security company CipherTrust told USA Today. Before, spammers included a link on email spam to direct recipients to a site containing pictures.
Today, the latest spam attack has the potential to cripple work flow even more than before. It can also become another thorn in the side of companies trying to defend against the latest spammers.
American consumers spent around $7.8 billion US over the past two years on computer repairs as a result of viruses and spyware alone — add image spam to the problem and IT technicians are going to be busier than a Black Eyed Peas summer tour.
Protecting against image spam requires anti-spam developers to start looking beyond the usual garbage flooding our inboxes. Now, bothersome graphics have to be in the crosshairs of anti-spammers looking to safeguard our hard drives from potential viruses.
Gmail’s impressive spam filter can only do so much.
