Spam Goes 3D 
Wednesday September 5, 2007
Spammers have been busy this year coming up with new and improved ways to ensure their message about discount Viagra, or no-money-down mortgage refinancing makes it to your email Inbox. They started by using image-based spam. Most spam filters rely on analyzing the text of the message to determine the likelihood that it is junkmail. The spam filters did not have a way to analyze text within an image, so the image spam got through. Eventually, spamb-blocking utilities came up with ways to identify and block most image-based spam, so spammers found new ways to spread their message. Recently we have seen a flood of spam disguised as an invitation to view an electronic greeting card from 'a friend', and a number of spam campaigns relying on PDF file attachments. The latest spam threat is '3D' spam. It is a twist on image-based spam which randomly generates a 3D like texture for each image to get past the defenses built to detect the image-based spam. You can learn more from this article at TheRegister.com.
Comments
Like most people, I abhor spam! It fills me with disgust that some people think there is no better way to sell their products than bu filling my inbox with junk. If I wanted breast enhancements, or Viuagra, I’d go get them from a local source.
My response to spam is to use a program called mail washer. It checks emails at source (my ISp server) and downloads just the headers and the first few lines of the message into its window. I can then quickly scan the headers, mark all the junk as such, check any that I am unsure of by looking at the message and decide whether to read, trash, bounce or blacklist.
Trash just deletes the message at source. Blacklist adds the address to a list which are automatically deleted and bounced. Bounce sends the originator a message to the effect that the email address was unobtainable, so don’t bother again. Not sure if that is effective but it is a darn sight better than trying to “unsubscribe” - all that does is tell the originator that the email address is “live”.
MailWasher learns, you can ascribe “friend” status toany email address incoming, the emails will still be scanned, you have the option to delete still, but the default is to allow.
Once I’ve checked, I activate my email client (T’bird) and read only the ones I want to read.