Image spam has made an unwelcome comeback by contributing 16 per cent to all the spam messages recorded at the end of April 2009.
“Image spam is 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 to evade antispam detection,” explained Shantanu Ghosh, vice-president, India Product Operations, Symantec.
Internet security firm Symantec’s State of Spam Report for the month of May says that though image spam does not currently dominate the spam landscape as it did in 2007, when 52 per cent of all spam was image spam, it has made a comeback. In fact, the number of spam messages which contain a URL has decreased, this can be attributed to the fact that the spam messages with an attached image do not have a URL in the message body.
The call to action for the recipient is often described in the attached image itself. For instance, a recipient would be 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 website promoting a certain pharmaceutical product,” says Ghosh.
Besides image spam, other trends observed in May were related to Swine Flu, Mother’s Day and President Obama’s first hundred days in office. Moreover, the report noted that the average size of spam messages has increased and this could put a strain on mail infrastructures and could also prevent end users from receiving legitimate emails.
