Spam Is On A Rise Again

Stephen Pao, vice President, Product Manager, Barracuda Networks, said that the observed hike in the penny stocks trading volume that are boosted in the spam mails provides considerable financial inspiration for plungers to send this kind of spam. He added that the spams related to other subjects like diet pills and drugs have also increased recently. The volume of spam is spiking and the method of dispatching spam is becoming more sophisticated.

Detecting and blocking spam containing simple text can be a difficult task as they are designed to look authentic text emails. The mass of text spam has specifically increased with the fame of the stock spam, as these types of spam are specifically suitable for text-only mails. The demand of action is just to transact the stocks, therefore, these mails need not to expose their intentions through implanted URLs or HTML tags.

Blocking a text-only spam mail usually requires a quick tactical reaction. Obscuring text-spam generally comprises of misspelled key words or insertion of unrelated phrases to cripple the spam filters. Tech-savvy spammers usually craft and check their spam messages against the existing famous spam filters. Hence, obstructing these spams that are engineered to pass through the filters needs early detection of an outburst and quick deployment of extenuation strategies.

Also, the firm informed a significant spike in mass of image-based spam that is in trend from the past six months. Image-based spam is giving problems to many solutions, which don't have all-inclusive feature set for protection.

Well, this is not something new and a lot of tools are available to design images and put background flecks in that. Multi-layered images can also be used in a GIF file across three separate layers so that when superimposed, the message is authentic.

Spammers are becoming highly aggressive and advanced in their attacking techniques and safety against spam has become a major concern again.

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» SPAMfighter News - 11/22/2006