One of the biggest problems that I have been seeing of late, and this is wide spread based on the feed back that I’ve had, is image based spam. Now, Barracuda Networks has announced that they have created an update to screen for this type of nuisance for their customers.
Image spam is unwanted e-mail in which text is embedded in an image to foil traditional spam filters that catch spam by scanning messages for key words and by using other text-based techniques. Barracuda says that approximately 25% of all unwanted e-mail today is image-based spam.
I would be very interested to see how they have managed to tease apart image spam from email with legitimate images. According to the article over on Network World this is accomplished by use of what they call “Optical Character Recognition”. I hope for their sakes that this works a little better than their other updates. 😉
[tags]Barracuda Networks, Image Spam, Spam, Antispam, OCR, Optical Character Recognition[/tags]
