Pig of a spam outcome!

Peter Dinham
Thursday, 14 May 2009 14:06

Business IT - Security

The security firm also said that, while image spam does not currently dominate the spam landscape, as it did in 2007 — when 52 percent of all spam was image spam —image spam hit an average of sixteen percent of all spam messages towards the end of April.

According to Symantec, image spam does from time to time reappear on the spam landscape, and in recent weeks a resurgence of image spam has been observed.
 
“Image spam is by definition a spam message which contains an attached image with little or no text, or HTML in the message body. The attached image will often contain various obfuscation techniques such as subtle changes to the colour or font and added background noise contained in the image in an effort to evade anti-spam detection.”

The call to action for the recipient, says Symantec, is often described in the attached image itself, with the recipient asked to type a certain URL into the address bar of their browser.

“If the recipient took this action and followed this URL they would be taken to a web-site promoting certain pharmaceutical products,” Symantec warns.