Technology

Stopping Image Spam

Spam message volumes have doubled over the past 12 months; situation is worsened by the recent emergence of image spam. The BorderWare Security Network has reported that image spam currently accounts for at least 35% of the overall spam volumes and this trend is on the rise. BorderWare data indicates that there are more than 25 image spam campaigns under way at any given time.

Image spam is a technique where the spam message consists of an image and a small amount of text that looks like it is 100% text-based, when in fact it is an image that looks exactly like a regular email message. In addition, while all image spam messages may look the same to an end-user, spammers have programs to automatically create each image to have slightly different coloration, speckle patterns, or fonts. This causes messages to appear unique when received and processed by spam filters. The randomness of the images and the message contents make image based spam difficult to classify. Current filters used to prevent image spam including OCR and fingerprinting are not effective to protect against today’s image spam threats. Source

To help defeat these attacks, BorderWare’s Intercept™ Image Analysis is one technology you can use to stop image spam. Intercept Image Analysis is an image classification technique, to be used in addition to the existing and effective threat detection techniques to specifically combat image spam. Learn More