Image Based Spam

[mandy]

Image-based spam has increased twelve-fold in the past year, and a higher percentage is making it past spam filters. According to research released by security gateway provider IronPort, images are varied each time a message is sent out.

Spam images are changed each time a message is sent. The difference may be a change in the border, or the variance of one pixel, but the change is enough to get past traditional content and signature-scanning filters. These spam messages are compared to snowflakes because each one is different...

About 78 percent of this pervasive spam passes through first- and second-generation spam filters. Sprosts estimates about 30 percent of spam delivered to an individual's inbox can be this type image-based messaging...

full article: http://www.clickz.com/stats/sectors/emai...hp/3616946

[bargainbloodhound]

That crap is becoming a real fr_k'n annoyance.  Most of it is getting by SpamAssassin. 

[regic]

more: http://biz.yahoo.com/iw/060628/0139844.html

Parameter                June 2005      June 2006    Change
Image Spam Prevalence    1%              12%          12x increase
Duration of Spam URL      48 hours        4 hours      12x faster
Volume of Spam            30 billion      55 billion    83% higher

[mandy]

A related article:

Very quickly, image-based spam rose to account for 30 percent of all spam.

Rather than find weird ways to write "Viagra" or "mortgage" or stock symbols for pump and dump schemes, the text would be written in a JPG and the filters couldn't catch it.

So spam filter vendors went to work analyzing embedded images in e-mail files. Just as the products are making it to market, Secure Computing's labs have found that spammers are using image hosting sites and some HTML code to make the image appear in the e-mail.

Secure Computing's Chief Research Scientist, Dmitri Alperovich, said that because the image is hosted rather than embedded, image filters don't examine the file. And since HTML tags are used, the image appears within the e-mail just like am embedded image...

full article: http://www.internetnews.com/security/art...hp/3674711

[accentnepal]

I have images turned off on Yahoo - image requests tell the spamster that the email has been opened.

Now I am getting spam that has images that somehow are part of the original message - not a separate file at all. (ought to view source on them to see if I can figure how they do that.) Most are low res pictures of pills (yummy). Alas, the Paris Hi|ton n@ked email did not include pictures.

[mandy]

A related article:

Senders of unsolicited electronic messages, also known as spammers, are outsmarting e-mail filters and other technologies designed to thwart them by deploying a new generation of image spam.

Spammers are cutting corners through a process that links to an image or photo from a popular image hosting, rather than attaching the spam message within an e-mail.

This technique could significantly optimize image spam volume, according to Secure Computing's TrustedSource Labs. Image spam surfaced last year when scam artists switched from using text to images to embed advertisements and other messages. Through the course of the year, image spam has gone through many iterations that make it more difficult to detect.

"(The latest technique) involves hosting messages as links to popular photo sites. It is harder to block these links or pull images even with black listing because it causes false positives,"...

full article: http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/9cmR...icks.xhtml

[accentnepal]

Still -- Yahoo's image filter should get that stuff. I am getting images that are sent as text, somehow.

Oh, to be 14 years old and understand all this....