Spam Email now accounts for 9 out of 10 emails sent

[jongrose]

Hearing from a lot of new friends lately? You know, the ones that write “It’s me, Esmeralda,†and tip you off to an obscure stock that is “poised to explode†or a great deal on prescription drugs.

You’re not the only one. spam is back — in e-mail in-boxes and on everyone’s minds. In the last six months, the problem has gotten measurably worse. Worldwide spam volumes have doubled from last year, according to Ironport, a spam filtering firm, and unsolicited junk mail now accounts for more than 9 of every 10 e-mail messages sent over the Internet.

Much of that flood is made up of a nettlesome new breed of junk e-mail called image spam, in which the words of the advertisement are part of a picture, often fooling traditional spam detectors that look for telltale phrases. Image spam increased fourfold from last year and now represents 25 to 45 percent of all junk e-mail, depending on the day, Ironport says.

The antispam industry is struggling to keep up with the surge. It is adding computer power and developing new techniques in an effort to avoid losing the battle with the most sophisticated spammers.

Full Story

I was just noticing that they were reporting on the techniques used to fight image spam, such as OCR and how spammers have been attempting to bypass that method, as we were talking about in the Pump & Dump spam thread.

Antispam firms spotted the skyrocketing amount of image spam this summer. A technology arms race ensued. The filtering companies adopted an approach called optical character recognition, which scans the images in an e-mail and tries to recognize any letters or words. Spammers responded in turn by littering their images with speckles, polka dots and background bouquets of color, which mean nothing to human eyes but trip up the computer scanners.

[agsteele]

I was just noticing that they were reporting on the techniques used to fight image spam, such as OCR and how spammers have been attempting to bypass that method

Of course spots and polka dots have zero effect on blocking based on originating ip address and goes to support continued use of the SCBL for me

Andrew