Dec 06 - Spam goes wild - when will it end?

It's not just SiteWeave clients who have been complaining about the amount of spam getting through the anti-spam filters lately. We do apologise if the spam getting through to your advanced mailbox has increased but heres the reason why:

The Spammers New Trick - image spam

Spammers are exploiting a new trick which spam filters are finding very difficult to tackle. Spammers are now sending their messages as an image. They create a image which shows the message as text. Anti-spam routines are having enormous difficulty sorting genuine images from these text spam images.

If you look at the image at the left, you will see that the creators have been careful to jumble the letters slightly and put them on a background which makes character recognition very difficult.

For the present, we can only apolgise if the anti-spam filter on advanced mailboxes seems less efficient than it did a few weeks ago. We use two of the best filters and as soon as a fix is found, your mailboxes will among the first to benefit.

More than 7 billion spam e-mails were detected worldwide in November, up from 2.5 billion in June and making up 91% of the 50 billion e-mails sent each day. Most big companies have spam filters but employees are still reporting increases as the spammers devise increasingly sophisticated methods to avoid detection.

For further details on image spam, click on one of the links below to read articles from The Times:

They’re hot air, but spam share scams are rising - 23 September
Spam, spam, spam, spam... you’ve got mail - 19 November
Spamalot: why laws have failed to stem the spam - 22 November
Gangsters hijack home PCs to choke Internet with spam: 25 November