The spam landscape has changed quite a lot in the last year or so with image spam and now the latest tactic is PDF and .zip attachments.

PDF’s of course being preferred by spammers as you don’t need to extract anything to view their spam, you just open it in your favourite PDF viewer and read all about viagra and cialis!

Of course there was some nasty exploits in PDF recently aswell with some other XSS issues associated.

Anyway the point is GFI has recently released a new white paper exploring PDF spam, which describes how spammers have changed their spamming tactics over the years and how the common PDF file format has been adopted to send image spam.

This white paper explains what makes spam such an unbearable problem and how spamming tactics are evolving daily to beat anti-spam software. In the space of two months, spammers have switched from image spam to using PDF, Excel and ZIP file attachments. By using these attachments to send images instead of embedding them in the body of the email message, spammers have taken the cat-and-mouse game with anti-spam software developers to a new level.

It’s quite an interesting read.

The white paper is freely available for download here:

Attachment spam – The latest trend [PDF]

No registration is required to access this white paper.

If you have any questions about this subject, GFI has said we can ask them anything we want about this subject – so we can basically conduct an interview online about image/pdf/attachment spam and spam fighting measures in general.

So, if you have any questions just leave them in the comments, or if you feel they are too long – use the Contact Darknet form.

Thanks!

As always, spam filters get better and smarter, but so do spammers..and frankly spammers have more to gain by beating the spam filters so they always work harder and think in more innovative ways.

As they get their spam resembling real emails more and more, the spam filters become less accurate.

On top of that they start using images to get the spam message across so it’s even harder to filter.

Earlier this year we thought the good guys were winning the war against spam. Back in January, I talked to spam fighters who were claiming victory in the spam wars. One company told me that the volume of spam had stopped growing at double-digit rates for the first time.

But that may have changed. Researchers and IT managers are now complaining that spam levels have risen significantly in recent months — some organizations have reported increases as high as 80 percent. Overall spam volume has increased 67 percent since August 2006, according to Barracuda Networks, an enterprise security appliance vendor.

I have noticed a massive surge in spam recently, especially comment and trackback spam, that’s why I’ve had to install more aggressive antispam measures on this site as it was getting overwhelming.

The new breed of spam manages to evade filters because it contains no suspect words, is sent from hundreds of thousands of different PCs, and includes no links. How does it work?

The new spam evades traditional spam filters because it doesn’t include any text — instead, it uses an image embedded in the body of an e-mail to deliver its message. This image includes text that displays the spammer’s message. But to make it hard for spam filters that may use optical character recognition technology to scan and read the text in the images, spammers are getting sneakier. They’re sending pictures with textured backgrounds or various colors to throw off the filters. They’re also varying the font for each letter of the text.

This way a spam filter can’t tell an unsolicited stock tip from a holiday picture of the family.

People are doing some interesting stock manipulation scams involving spam and penny stocks, do read the rest of the article at Infoworld.

Source: Infoworld