| Spam on IP telephony
Spam filters can easily be trained to give better than 90 per cent effectiveness with zero false positives, and for those who still suffer from a lot of spam in their inboxes, they are either not updating their spam databases often enough, or they just do not see the value of getting 90 per cent fewer email messages. There was also a bout of Spasms (spam over SMS) - less of a problem for businesses, where this does not seem to have been endemic, but pretty nasty for many children who find that they get messages asking for a response, and then find that up to £10 has been taken from their mobile account as a result. .
Study: Image spam levels rocket
Image spam levels have soared over the past six months, now accounting for over half of all spam, according to new research. Figures released by Marshal show that image spam has jumped by 175 percent since September last year, representing 56 percent of all spam sent over the past six months.This rise in picture-based spam coincides with the decline of messages containing embedded URL links, the study claims. In 2004, 96 percent of spam messages included a website hyperlink for the recipient to click. This figure has dropped to just over half, according to the research.Spammers are constantly morphing their practices to overcome anti-spam filters, said Bradley Anstis, director of product management for Marshal. And we can expect image spam levels to continue to increase this year.
Spam mimics legit newsletters
Those ubiquitous Viagra ads have been disguising themselves as e-mail newsletters, the kind you get to find out the latest airline deals or keep up with your fantasy football team. Spammers haven't actually broken into legitimate marketers' computer systems to send out the messages. Rather, like the phishing scams that lift the code off the real Web sites of financial institutions, spammers have tweaked legitimate e-mail and sent them through normal spam channels. The technique appears aimed at bypassing human and software controls. Recipients might not immediately realize they are opening spam, and spam filters might not be able to aggressively block them for fear of blocking legitimate newsletters as well, anti-spam experts say. .
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