Image Spam Receding Finally, Says Marshal

Marshal - a UK security firm - said that the image spam e-mails that overwhelmed the World Wide Web in the beginning of this year have waned to the mid '06 levels. M-net.net.nz published this on May 28, 2007.

For the week that ended on 20th May 2007, image-spam made up just 15.6% of the entire spam, as against 60% in January this year.

Image-spam scams are not restricted to e-mails alone. For example, the newly found Pykse.A worm launches attacks on Skype PC calling service users through its integrated IM (Instant Messaging) program. Users receive the image of a good-looking model, however the worm gets downloaded on the users' machine as soon as the picture is clicked upon. The worm then wreaks havoc on the machines it infects.

Internet was nearly brought to a standstill as the image spam easily evaded the traditional spam guards that depended on searching for the text to identify & block unsolicited or offending emails. Scammers realized that turning their textual messages in to pictures was the best trick to evade detection and fool the anti spam software.

Bradley Anstis, Product Management Director for Marshal, said that it was the lowest level they had witnessed in image-spam from mid July last year. M-net.net.nz published this on this May 28.

He continued, "Last year, image spam represented about 13% of all spam emails. Afterwards in October (same year), we started observing a dramatic decline in both their consistency and volume. Image spam emerged as the most pervasive kind of spam emails during the 1st quarter of this year (2007). Often, the rate exceeded 40% of the entire spam. This January saw the image spam peak with 56.1% of all spam. But, they have been coming downwards for the last two months and have now returned to the same level as they were during the mid '06." M-net.net.nz published this on May 28, 2007.

During the 2nd week of May 2007, Sophos' senior technology consultant Graham Cluley said, "Image spam's circulation nearly doubled during the year 2006 and has already proved to be amongst the most prevalent spamming trends for this year. Since, anti spam filters, which depend on textual spam content's analysis for spam detection, fail to diagnose the presence of image spam." Help Net Security published this in news.

Related article: Image Spam Set to Hit Worldwide PCs Back

» SPAMfighter News - 6/5/2007