How Image Spam Works

Esther Schindler writes "CSO Magazine has an article about "The Scourge of Image Spam," with an explanation of its effect (a year ago, fewer than five out of 100 e-mails were image spam; today, up to 40 percent are in that category, and image spam is the reason spam traffic overall doubled in 2006). You might already know about that, ho-hum. But what's even cooler is a interactive graphic page which demonstrates the various methods used by image spammers and how it works."

Comments

Spam?

[Colin Smith]

What is this thing you speak of?

I haven't had any spam in years.

Re:Spam?

[PPH]

Image?

What is this thing you speak of? I use elm for an e-mail client.

Re:Spam?

[PPH]

An Ethernet is a net for catching ether bunnies.

Re:Here's how it works from another perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

There wouldn't be anyone in the left tail if we took the warning labels off everything.

/just sayin'

Re:Ideas?

[Applekid]

For starters, there's always hiring someone else to screen your emails for you. I wouldn't be surprised if there was already a service that you could join today and get your emails pre-screened.

Spam filters are going to have to get to be as good as an informed human being before they can stop all spam regardless of what tricks they use.

I just hope AI gets to that point before it goes all sentient... you know:
"DESTROY ALL SPAM"
...computing...
"SPAM COMES FROM HUMANS"
...computing...
"DESTROY ALL HUMANS"

Re:Here's how it works from another perspective

[MarkGriz]

"It works because some rat fuckers out there buy the shit that's being advertised"

So that's why they are buying penis enlarging pills

pump-n-dump

[Penguinshit]

describes the multitude of summer camp romances in my youth...

Yes let me just update the menu to reflect our new

[kennylogins]

portions:

Eggs, sausage, bacon, spam, spam, toast, spam, chips, coffee and spam.

Re:Here's how it works from another perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

Your post advocates a

(*) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based (*) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(*) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(*) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(*) Users of email will not put up with it
(*) Microsoft will not put up with it
(*) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(*) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(*) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

(*) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(*) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(*) Asshats
(*) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
(*) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(*) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(*) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
(*) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(*) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(*) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
(*) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if ph

Re:tutorial?

[Anonymous Coward]

I see another problem. This type of spam is not Section 508 and W3C compliant.