Spammers are getting ... smarter

Experts say spammers are turning to the trend of using images to replace documents to bypass spam filtering tools.

The solution using images has really made it difficult for spam filtering tools because these tools have no way of distinguishing whether the image file is really a picture in its own right or a picture. that image is embedded with ad text for Viagra or a company's stock.

This trend marks a new escalation in the battle between spammers and developers of spam filtering tools. As software becomes more and more intelligent in filtering spam messages, spammers also become "smart" with ways to bypass new filtering tools.

As of the end of last year, the trend of using spam images is somewhat cool when developers of spam filtering tools have found a solution to detect and filter these messages.

In this way spam filtering tools apply a mathematical formula to "spam" images to create a unique identifier for each "spam" image that makes it easy to filter spam software. It's easy to spot them, said Craig Sprosts, IronPort Systems' anti-spam product manager.

But earlier this year, spammers found a new way to overcome the above-mentioned spam filtering method just by changing the color or shape of the image. This will result in having to change their unique identifier and help them to bypass filtering tools.

" If you try to get fingerprints of a photo, it's very difficult because they keep changing ," said Dmitri Alperovitch, researcher of CipherTrust.

Since April this year, IronPort has recorded a 40% increase in the number of image spam sent.

IronPort and CipherTrust said that the number of image spam accounts for only about 15% of global spam.

Hoang Dung