New WHITE PAPER Release: Invasion of the Image Spammers!...

Free White Paper discusses new perils in Spam emails, 
and how to avoid them.

March 26th 2007, New Canaan, CT

Think your current Spam filter is doing a good enough job? Maybe you should think again.

Spam message volumes have doubled over the past 12 months and are expected to triple in the near future, and end users are seeing twice as much uncaught spam in their inboxes (Source: Borderware Security Network).

While most email filters are still catching the old style spam messages, they are working twice as hard due to this change in volume. In addition, there is a new and dangerous development in spam, with spammers using different techniques to fool existing filters. Take for instance the problem of image spam. While it may look to you just like a regular text email, it is in fact an image of a text email, and as such evades the filters based on word recognition. This kind of spam now accounts for 35% of spam invasion, and this figure is on the increase.

Even if an image is recognized as spam and 'fingerprinted' as such, the spammer still has a further weapon to use. The image can be split or reconfigured, so that even though it has already been caught and fingerprinted, it will appear different each time, and could therefore evade the filter. To further confuse, small 'speckles' can be added to an image, just small enough to fool the image filter without changing the body of the email. More recent developments have seen a rise in the use of rare or uncommon fonts rendered in images with the intent of avoiding detection by OCR techniques. (OCR is Optical Character Recognition - changing an image to a text letter based on its shape, and is designed to recognize the common font shapes and to decode the images into text.)

Clive Horton is CEO of Re-Soft International, a trusted advisor in the challenging world of email security and archiving. "The cost of these evolving spam threats to a business is colossal' says Horton - "It threatens email systems on two levels. Firstly, it occupies valuable space in mailboxes and wastes user time in sifting for legitimate email.

Secondly, (and potentially most damaging), it carries real dangers of invasive spyware, theft of sensitive data and intellectual property from hidden key stroke capture programs, as well as the ever present threat of viruses. Organizations dare not be complacent, and must proactively address these dangers first and foremost through effective technology, but also through ongoing user education about the ubiquitous problem of spam".

The downloadable white paper discusses why image spam is so difficult to control and explains how the MXtreme suite of perimeter appliances, developed by Borderware and deployed by Re-Soft International, apply leading edge technologies to make significant reductions in image spam threats.

To download the free white paper, and to find out more about Re-Soft International, go to www.re-soft.com/bz.

About ReSoft International
ReSoft International is an independent integrator and reseller of best-of-breed software technologies that address Email & Instant-Messaging Security, Regulatory Compliance and Storage Relief. ReSoft has, for over 11 years, acted as a trusted advisor to hundreds of organizations, applying these Email & IM Security tools to reduce liability risks. 

All trademarks mentioned are respected
###