Spam 3.0
The last few weeks have seen a stepping up of spam e-mail tactics, what I will label Spam 3.0.
The new varaints are completely graphical spam messages, using embedded images using MIME. This is a pretty serious development. It means that spam originators have found anti-spam filtering based on text filtering so effective that they have turned to a strain of all-graphical content. An example from my Inbox on Gmail, which did not catch this as spam:
Think of it in biological terms - widespread use of penecillin and antibiotics have produced strains of bacteria resistant to the two drugs. Same thing here - spammers have specifically engineered a new breed of spam to evade text-based filtering. They likely had it developed long ago, waiting in the wings.
This Spam 3.0 is much harder to filter, because you need to do optical character recognition (OCR) on the Base64 encoded images, requiring more CPU to decode, and better artificial intelligence to recognize the script in the graphical messages. You could just reject all MIME messages as spam, but that’s a pretty serious move.
At the World Economic Forum in January 2004, Bill Gates said that “spam would be solved” in two years. It’s July 2006. To Mr. Gates - does Spam 3.0 going “image-borne” make this the last gasp for spam, or the beginning of whole new strains of headaches for years to come? I’m not optimistic.
July 9th, 2006 05:58
In a sense, it’s a last-gasp. The harder spammers have to work to hide their emails from scanning programs, the less effective they are as actual advertising, and the more easily they are recognised as spam instantly by their human recipient. Ironically, spam looks more spammy the more it tries to hide from automated solutions.
Many email programs, like gmail, don’t even display attached images as inline or display them in reduced size. I’ve recieved ones like this in gmail, which are unreadable at the preview thumbnail size.