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How Image Spam Works

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the it-wasn't-me-i-was-framed dept.

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."

2 of 278 comments (clear)

  1. For me it's not image spam, it's botnet traffic... by garcia · · Score: 5, Informative

    For me the spam e-mails are minimal to my machine. I do see a couple of them come in through GMail on the account that I have posted publicly on my website for people to contact me but for the most part they are the standard stock pump and dumps or phishing schemes.

    What has been killing me recently were the fucking botnet "attacks" sucking my DSL's bandwidth with those douchebags hitting me with a GET and an immediate POST for tons of URLs all over my site. Their referrer was http://www.google.com/ and for a few hours I couldn't figure out how to stop that w/o stopping Google search referrals too.

    Some nice guy in #apache helped me out with:

    SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://www.google.com/?$" BadReferrer=1

    SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://www.google.com/?$" BadReferrer
    order deny,allow
    deny from env=BadReferrer

    That has been returning 403s to the botnet which apparently stop such frequent attempts when they receive the error. I was getting hit with their shit every 4 to 5 seconds all day yesterday and now they are "pinging" me with attempts every hour or so. I don't know if it's a different botnet or the same one trying to get back in but that was the most effectual way to drop the huge spam traffic I was receiving but couldn't ban due to the wide range of IPs.

    Botnets fucking suck :(

  2. Re:Spam? by LiquidCoooled · · Score: 4, Informative

    The spam recipe bar is an offshoot from the WebClips feature of your inbox.
    The inbox can be configured to have a single item selected at random from one of a number of RSS feeds, I have mine configured to show Routers oddly enough and slash.

    The area marked for webclips is a custom feed from www.recipesource.com

    If you look on your trash folder, you also get tips about recycling.

    The other folders give standard syndication adverts.

    More info here

    --
    liqbase :: faster than paper