Are spammers an endangered species?
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Uncategorized on
We are experiencing a new wave of junk email that could be best described as Spam 2. What with the tidal wave of PDF spam that hit last month, and the MS Excel attachment spam that has taken over from it this month. But is it really a next generation spam trend, or the desperate death throes of an industry which sees a cash cow shot in the head by ever improving anti-spam technologies?
There can be no denying that the latest spam wave has been carefully designed to circumvent those technologies that work by analyzing content alone, and wrapping messages in new file formats is one way of achieving that. But then so was the image spam epidemic that truly did flood mailboxes the world over for many months, until the anti-spam guys got on top of it.
I can’t see the Spam 2 being any more successful, especially as there are plenty of heavyweight anti-spam solutions out there that look for patterns in mass emails which can block it automatically. A content-agnostic approach will uncover image based spam in any format or language, combine it with a zombie detection system to offload unwanted traffic at the network perimeter based upon history and reputation of the sender and spammers increasingly look like an endangered species. “In the last month, image based Spam 2 attacks including pdf and excel spam accounted for over 50% of all spam we detected” says Steve Cornish from anti-spam company PineApp “Excel spam on its own currently accounts for just 5% but this still represents millions of messages and next month we may start to see PowerPoint or Word files.”
Meanwhile, Sophos technology guru Graham Cluley reckons that there has been a dramatic decrease in the amount of PDF spam already, and that this is proof that it makes for an unprofitable spam mechanism. How dramatic a fall? How about from a high of 30% of all spam at the start of the month to, well, just about none at all right now.
“If PDF spam email messages have all but disappeared, there can only be one reason - they’re not working” says Cluley “Spammers wouldn’t turn away from PDF spam if it was an effective way to fill their pockets with cash and direct consumers to their websites, dodgy goods or dodgy investment opportunities.
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