Spammers getting smarter?

November 17, 2006 · Posted in Mike's Blog 

With the advent of heuristic anti-spam softwares and spam databases, many thought that the lives of spammers will be over but it didn’t.  Spammers still manage to get away with their spam tactics and even manage to make money out of it.

A few months ago, after enjoying lots of months with very little spam in my inbox, I started getting a new breed of spam mails.  This time, they contain graphics.  Without text, it will be impossible to trigger heuristic flags on whether an email is spam or not.  What these annoying spammers do is type their message in an image editing program, save it as GIF, and email the GIF image.  This way, the recipient reads the message but anti-spam software can’t.

In my head, I knew that sooner or later, anti-spam software will be able to catch this spammy GIF images through OCR or Optical Character Recognition but just before I saw the good guys develop the needed techniques, I started seeing a new and evolved version of the GIF image spam emails.  Take a look at the image below (note, I’m in no way endorsing whatever they are offering):

SPAM GIF

Notice how the letters are waved to make it difficult for OCR software to recognize the message.  Furthermore, the background of the image is some sort of an abstract picture making it even harder for OCR to read it.  It looks like more of a Captcha image which is used by the good guys to prevent spam - this time, the spammers are using the same idea to protect their spam.

This indeed is a classic example of bad guys using the tools of the good guys to make bad things.  I just hope that someone will be able to stop all these spam so that we can all live with a clean inbox.

If you’re determined to stop SPAM, I would recommend Spam Bully for Outlook and Outlook Express users.  For all the rest, I recommend Spamweed.  Another one that I also strongly recommend is THIS.



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