IMAGE SPAM AND PHISHING – THE NEW PLAGUE

Spam filters have become common on home and office computers in the last few years and they have had a decided impact on reducing junk mail and exposure to phishing scams. Spam filters work in a variety of ways, but most analyze the text component of an email for tell-tale signs of spam.

However this technique of textual analysis does not work on images and spammers have been moving to sending messages as image files and not as text files. Text based spam filters cannot analyze these files and the spam is sent through to your mailbox.
A recent study by a leading software security provider saw an increase in image spam - phishers using multiple randomized images to bypass email filters. Symantec found 157,477 unique phishing messages during the first half of this year - an increase of 81 percent from the previous six months. During that time, spam made up 54 percent of all monitored email messages, a hike of 4 percent from the previous half-year.
For these new image spam messages and phishing attacks there is a technical solution – optical character recognition followed by textual analysis. Needless to say, more powerful computers are required for this detection and rejection mechanism.

The critical element to remember in Identity Theft prevention is do not open spam. If the message does not contain an understandable subject and if it does not come from an email address you recognize – then don’t open it. And if you do, NEVER, reply and NEVER buy anything from a spam source. Further always remember the fundamental rule for avoiding phishing – your financial and service providers will NEVER ask for personal information on the web, by email, or by phone. If they do, they are thieves.