Spam is back with a vengeance
Found on Physorg on Wednesday, 06 December 2006
A study released last month by the security firm Postini found that unwanted messages now account for 91 percent of all e-mail, and over the past 12 months the daily volume of spam rose by 120 percent.
A separate report by California-based IronPort Systems concluded that worldwide spam volumes increased from 31 billion messages daily in October 2005 to 61 billion messages per day in October 2006.
Image spam reached a new high of 25 percent of total spam volume in October 2006, an increase of 421 percent in a year, according to IronPort.
"Spammers are using advanced mathematical and graphical techniques like random modification of image pixels and dynamic construction of images from multiple components to bypass spam filtering tools," he said.
Somehow, it's amazing how many total idiots are out there, falling for spam. Everybody who lost money because of phoney stocks or thanks to a 419er deserves that. The image spam is, for me, fairly easy to stop. Simply reject all emails with an gif/jpg attachment below 100kB. Additionally, servers listed at one of the bigger blocklists are rejected too, even if now and then a legitimate email might be blocked that way. I rarely use emails anymore; instant messaging is more convenient.