Image spam: Spam gets more canny
Spammers have discovered a new trick.
According to a report 
in USA Today, image-based spam is experiencing a huge growth spurt. Late last year it accounted for 1% of total spam messages; now it has suddenly risen to 21%.
In the newspaper article, journalist Jon Swartz describes the problem:
The newest spam uses technology that varies the content of individual messages — through colors, backgrounds, picture sizes or font types — so they appear to be distinct to spam filters… As a result, the messages are like snowflakes: No two are alike… The surge in new spam has largely eluded software filters and eaten up space on e-mail systems because each message is more than seven times larger than regular spam…
I’ve certainly noticed a recent surge in the amount of spam getting past Apple Mail’s excellent Junk Filter.
Much of it is image-based, although I am favoured more with various aids for my sexual potency than with the stock scams that are usually associated with image spam.
Mail’s Junk filter, based on Latent Semantic Analysis, only gets smarter as it goes along. I hope it is not a slow learner. Although, since the filter is text-based, this new form of spam may have outflanked it.
[Thanks, Bob]
Tags: Apple Mail, email, images, Internet, junk filter, mail.app, spam, stock scamsRelated posts
July 27th, 2006 at 11:30 pm
I wonder if the Junk Filter is training itself on the text in the subject line as well as the mail content, or other fields of the mail header?
I have a hunch that Mail isn’t considering that information but it might be a useful thing to include in the Junk Filter training regime. Unlike the content, which allows many ways to disguise the content with html tags and images, the subject line, and other headers are required by the protocol to be straight text.
July 28th, 2006 at 3:01 am
yeah, so my gmail account has been overloaded with this, and marking as spam does nothing….not sure why there can not be a SIMPLE rule that says (for example) if email has no content (text) and only image attachments and is NOT from a contact in my contact book then it gets tagged as spam - wouldn’t that be easier? the images are assorted sizes and colors, but almost all contain zero body text….
July 28th, 2006 at 11:46 am
I’ve been getting a lot of that recently from one of the larger websites I work for. It has one of those opt-in tips emails that’s sent to everybody, and lately the spammers got to sending the image only-emails.
Now, it’s morphed where they are still sending the same image-spam, but they’ve added worthless text to keep the image-only files going strait to the deleted folder on the server. So, I fight back with an app that I stopped using because other filters were working well enough, JunkMatcher.
And, guess what? Works like a charm. Adding JunkMatcher to Mail pretty much ensures you’re as safe as you’re going to be.
July 28th, 2006 at 2:21 pm
Tim,
Based on some comments on this site and others I’ve tried to put together a more detailed look at the graphic spam problem. A lot of people do not seen to grasp the issue. Take a look.
http://web.mac.com/bobperdriau/iWeb/Site/Blog/Blog.html
Bob
July 29th, 2006 at 12:16 pm
indeed - mail junk mail filter has been acting terribly lately. it simply no longer works! i am in the process of shifting to thunderbird. just have to decide whether to access my mac.com mail using pop or imap
July 29th, 2006 at 11:23 pm
Most text based spam these days get filtered out, but the Mail.app filter can’t seem to get it’s head around these image spams. :|
August 1st, 2006 at 10:56 pm
[...] MacInTouch reader Bill Benson posted a rule in the .Mac section of that site yesterday which will catch much of the current plague of image spam. [...]