Spam 2.0

You’ve got to hand it to them, Spammers try damn hard to find new ways to hit you with messages that don’t actually relate to your life - and according to the New York Times, they’ve doubled their output:

Spam is back — in e-mail in-boxes and on everyone’s minds. In the last six months, the problem has gotten measurably worse. Worldwide spam volumes have doubled from last year, according to Ironport, a spam filtering firm, and unsolicited junk mail now accounts for more than 9 of every 10 e-mail messages sent over the Internet.

Much of that flood is made up of a nettlesome new breed of junk e-mail called image spam, in which the words of the advertisement are part of a picture, often fooling traditional spam detectors that look for telltale phrases. Image spam increased fourfold from last year and now represents 25 to 45 percent of all junk e-mail, depending on the day, Ironport says.

The antispam industry is struggling to keep up with the surge. It is adding computer power and developing new techniques in an effort to avoid losing the battle with the most sophisticated spammers.

Our favorites are the message in the image that the Spam blocker can’t detect or more recently the spam to our ’social network’ accounts like YouTube:

Spam Doubles, Finding New Ways to Deliver Itself - New York Times

[via Wired]