In January 2004 Bill Gates promised the Web would be spam-free in 2006. With the end of the year approaching I cannot help but wonder: are the spammers getting wiser or is Microsoft dazed by the spam-storm? After all, most spam comes from Widows systems. Word is that Microsoft cares more about software piracy than protecting users against spam, phishers and viruses. So, basically, they care more about their money than about customers’ satisfaction.
So here we are, at the end of 2006, facing a double volume of spam in comparison to last year’s statistics. The newest trend is what they call “image spam”. These emails fool the traditional spam detectors using a simple technique: their creators add some phrases below the picture and the spam detectors take the e-mail as a genuine e-mail. Some examples of such phrases: “At the corners of her mouth dimples appeared briefly in the solidity of flesh and then disappeared. Once – he would have sworn it was so – that hole had been as big as the bore of the Lincoln Tunnel. But the blue-ribbon winner (at least until Annie Wilkes had entered his life) had been Mrs Roman D. Oh Annie oh my Jesus Annie killed that stupid broad – He rolled back and peeked through the window.” Does this make any sense to you? Or another: “She looked vaguely at the calendar, where the smiling boy rode his sled through an endless February. She looked worse than he had ever seen her, her face haggard and pate, her eyes darting constantly. She looked worse than he had ever seen her, her face haggard and pate, her eyes darting constantly. He rolled forward and then the hubs of the wheels stuck solid against the sides of the bedroom door.”
As you see, these phrases have a pattern. They “tell a story”. The spam blockers are not intelligent. They cannot tell whether this story is a normal message or nonsense. There’s not much anty-spam software could do to block such messages. Unfortunately the overzealous antispam software block legit messages from legit companies and still let such crap go through. The problem is that spam emails can clog your servers.
Spammers might also be using your computer (or mine for that matter) to send out their messages. If you’ve (accidentally) downloaded a virus (and you are still unaware of its presence on your PC) your computer might be sending out spam as you read this article.
Spammers even beat the most sophisticated spam filters such as those based on optical character recognition. Symantec’s systems – that used to recognize the patterns of spam – are helpless too in front of image spam. Spammers have developed software that changes automatically a few pixels in each image. And it is useless to tell you that those “tales” are inserted in each e-mail spam randomly. I guess you’ve figured that out alone.
Personally I doubt that Microsoft or anyone else could do anything about it. I think antispammers are losing. But I am an optimistic person, so… let’s wait and see. Who knows? Maybe Microsoft will understand one day that spam is causing higher financial loss than software piracy… You never know.
