Image spam – an exploding threat
The spam problem is growing faster than ever and the spammers are getting increasingly sophisticated. The number of spam has grown with more than 40 % since April and the latest form of spam is so-called image spam.
Spam images are changed each and every time a message is sent. This form of spamming has increased twelve-fold in the past year and a higher percentage is making it through the spam filters. The difference in each spam may be a change in the border, variance in one pixel etc., something that is enough to make it pass through traditional filters.
Image spam accounts for more than five billion messages every day on a world wide basis. Image spam is also larger than other forms of spam and can be eight times larger than a regular spam message.
Around 80 % of image-based messages is sent from hijacked zombie machines remotely controlled by hackers. Spammers rotate through zombie machines every few hours and change IP addresses to evade blacklists. The average life cycle of a domain used in s spam message was 48 hours as of June last year.
The latest version of Norman Email Protection is able to detect and stop image based spam. You can read more about this product here.
