Craig Burton

I don't know about you but I delete cookies and clean disk regularly and the spam in my inbox is much lower than before. Then again maybe most of us are maybe doing all that and now the artful spammer is finding better ways to get to us - Image spam!

So what exactly is Image Spam? Image spam comes as an image with a marketing message hidden inside some URL in the text somewhere. The spammer hopes you will click on it and your filters do not usually detect it.

Image spam, had declined steadily from about twelve percent of all spam at the beginning of the year, down to about five percent in November. But since then, the use of image spam, jumped dramatically in December 2005, to 25 percent of all spam.

Spam filters get fooled: Typically most Spam Filters would check for certain text words in the incoming messages and these are then filtered out as SPAM. Some of the filters have no mechanism of knowing whether a file containing graphics can be a genuine photograph or unsolicited messages wrapped in .gif files.

Many of the spammers have opted for this method, as they feel sure their unsolicited messages can slip through fooling the anti-spam filters. Therefore once the picture has

// posted by Craig @ 7:00 AM