White Papers for Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC)

Fight image spam with your eyes open

Tumbleweed Communications

It’s no secret that spammers are increasingly turning to graphics. A JPEG, GIF,or PNG with words as part of the image means that text-based email filters can’t see the words—and thus are powerless to stop it. The spam message will include some misleading text to fool text filters to let it through as trusted.While many email security vendors claim to feature image filters, these filters often rely on technology that requires part or all of an image to be an exact match to a known spam image. To fool these filters, spammers have added randomization to the graphics. This randomization assures that no two messages will have exactly the same graphic, making it impossible to have graphics that match 100% to graphics in the image database.

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